Triple Crown

[Sonmi-451]

So I know that I'm probably just putting this out there for myself, and that no one else is actually reading this, but, because I have posted too much to give up on this story now, I'm going to finish posting it, if only for my own vindication.

More added.

“Lizzie, Lizzie,” I hear someone calling, and I open my eyes blearily. For a second, I am filled with the idea that the person calling my name is Jackson, and that the two forms standing above me are Jackson and Luke, and that we’re back in our dimension and everything’s fine, that the last three, terrible months have just been one long nightmare. The sharp scent of blood, fear and sadness and the clean scents of the snow and the forest then fill my nose, and Marshall’s features come into focus, and all of those fantasies are destroyed.
“Lizzie, where’s Luke?” Marshall asks me urgently, and everything that happened before I laid down in the snow to freeze and die comes flooding back. A new wave of grief overtakes me as I think about Abby, but I push that to the side momentarily to think about what Marshall asked me.
“I… I don’t know,” I answer quietly in reply, still feeling numb from everything that happened earlier. I can’t believe Abby’s actually dead, that I actually failed so quickly. I thought I would be able to keep her alive at least a week.
I blindly try to rise to my feet to find that my limbs are frozen from lying in the snow, and lay there on the ground for a few moments, stretching them out, before finally being able to get up. I see Marshall’s amazed expression at me not being dead – I’ve been lying in the snow for at least five hours, based off the change of the sun’s position in the sky – but he doesn’t say anything to voice his amazement. That’s probably because there are a lot more important things to be talking about right now
“I found a sword and pack of supplies about a mile that way,” he says, gesturing towards the north end of the clearing, where Marissa was standing.
When I don’t say anything in reply – mostly because I still don’t trust my own voice to not give my internal pain away – Marshall asks me, “Do you think they could have belonged to whoever the gunshot was for earlier?”
I turn to look over at Marshall and find him watching me almost warily, as though he’s expecting me to lose it at any time. The scariest part is that he might not be so crazy in those fears. However, I don’t see any more than the normal amount of worry in his eyes, so I rule out the possibility that the bag he found was Luke’s.
I happened to find Abby’s backpack in the middle of the clearing a little while after she died – or at least it seemed like a little while; I suppose it could have been centuries, for all that my sense of time can be relied on right now – so I know that the bag Marshall found isn’t hers either. He seems to know that too; I guess he must have seen the blood spots in the snow, found me asleep with half-frozen tears on my face and put two and two together. I’m incredibly grateful that he hasn’t said anything about it yet, as I don’t think that I could bear to talk about what happened to Abby right now. I’d probably just break down crying again, and that wouldn’t be good at all.
“Maybe,” I reply numbly, surveying the clearing and painfully reliving every excruciating detail of Abby’s death in my mind. The thought occurs to me that Luke and Hunter could have been here too, and that the backpack and sword belonged to Hunter, who Luke killed, but I quickly brush that thought out of my mind. There’s no way that Luke could have held his ground against Hunter for any length of time, unless Hunter was incredibly weak or half-frozen. Wait, half-frozen…
I find myself turning to Marshall and saying, “I think the backpack and sword are Hunter’s, and Luke killed him to protect him and Abby. That means that Luke is still around here somewhere-” – I pause for a moment to test the air and find that Luke’s scent, as well as a whole hell of a lot of blood, is in the wind, and I curse myself for not thinking of this earlier; I suppose I have a decent excuse for being mentally out of it earlier though – “and that he’s probably lying out in the snow, bleeding to death right now.” My heart falls out of my chest to land somewhere around my midsection at the words I’m saying, and I force myself to take a deep breath and swallow. I can’t let Luke die on me today too; I think I really would lose it if that happened.
I turn back to Marshall and tell him desperately, “I can’t let Luke die on me today too. We have to find him, Marshall.” I hear the shakiness and almost fragility of my voice and think idly that maybe it’s a good thing that Marshall can hear how unnerved I am; maybe it will spur him to action quicker if he sees that the concrete girl is close to breaking.
Instead of questioning my theory, like any sane person with knowledge of Luke or Hunter but not of me would, or telling me to stay here while he goes to check it out, like any sane person with no knowledge of me would, Marshall just says, “Alright,” and gestures for me to lead the way.
We cross the clearing in silence, the crunching snow underneath our feet the only sound to break the still air. Marshall is observant enough to see how shaken up I am and, thank God, wise enough not to ask me about it, so both of us are left to our thoughts as we walk.
I can’t believe I let Abby down and broke my promise to myself that quickly; I should have been able to keep her alive for a lot longer than a day! If I hadn’t run off last night looking for Adelaide and Marcus, Luke, Marshall and Abby wouldn’t have split up because I would have been able to hold us together against the non-careers and stand up to Kuro. Again, I’ve failed my friends when they need me most, and come back in time only to see them die.
“Lizzie, look.” Marshall’s voice pulls me out of my thoughts, and, shaking my head slightly, I turn my gaze onto him to see where he’s pointing. It’s a bootprint that has to be Luke’s, because it’s too small to be Hunter’s, with a small puddle of blood in the snow next to it.
“You were right,” Marshall murmurs, tearing his eyes away from the footprint to glance around at the forest for any other clues. “Luke’s in here somewhere.”
“Now we just have to find him,” I say quietly, and Marshall nods his head. Well, there’s only about seven thousand, five hundred square miles of forest in the whole arena; how possibly could we not find him quickly?

“We need to find Luke quickly, Marshall,” I tell him as we set up our tent around a small camp fire. As Marissa and Hunter were probably the only careers to come up here, and there probably aren’t any people nearby – well, except for Luke, wherever he may be – we’ve decided it’s safe to start a small fire. Besides, after spending all day in the trees, we know the woods around us far better than anyone else does, so we’re about as safe as you’re going to get in a Triple Crown arena.
“We’ll find him tomorrow, Lizzie,” Marshall tells me reassuringly. He’s told me that same thing nearly five times now, but I guess he doesn’t get tired of trying to shut me up. “For now, we just have to hope that he’s set himself up in his tent and isn’t lying out in the snow freezing.”
I bite my tongue in order to stop myself from adding, “Or bleeding to death,” but the mood of the air around us is as bad as if I had actually said it. After all, the mere thought of someone dying doesn’t exactly help people’s morale.
“It will be fine, Lizzie,” Marshall says, his eyes locking on mine, but the lack of conviction in his words isn’t convincing at all. “Right now, all you can do for Luke is rest up so that way you’re prepared and fully energized to keep searching for him tomorrow.”
After sighing deeply – I really do hate it when Marshall is right about things like this – I nod my head in agreement and admittance and crawl into the tent to have Marshall crawl in after me. It’s technically only a one-person tent, but it’s the best Marshall and I can do right now, so it’s going to have to work.
Suddenly Puck’s booming voice breaks the silence of the forest, and he announces solemnly, “Section One: Michael Smith. Section Four: Marissa Evans and Hunter Knightley. Section Five: Abigail Williams. Section Six: Andrea Sparks. Section Seven: Claire Downs.” Puck pauses for a moment, making it clear that he’s not going to say any more names, and my eyebrows shoot up in surprise. I hadn’t realized so many people had died while I was incapacitated in the snow.
“And your kill leader for today is... Lizzie Lighting, with five kills!” Puck announces, his voice oozing true enthusiam here, and I groan. Why on earth does he insist on being so cheerful for singling me out to die?
After a few minutes, I’ve laid my head down and am about to drift off to sleep when a clacking sound next to me jerks me wide awake. Looking over, I find Marshall huddled up under all of the blankets we could muster, shivering, with his teeth chattering uncontrollably. I hadn’t realized it was that cold in here, but I guess my perception of temperature isn’t exactly the best, considering that I literally cannot get cold.
Taking a deep breath and sighing at what I know I’m going to have to do, I wordlessly scoot over towards Marshall, lift the blankets up, and press myself against him to hear his teeth stop chattering almost immediately.
“You’re like a furnace,” Marshall murmurs in my ear, his arms wrapping around me possessively.
“I know,” I reply quietly in reply, slightly grateful for the human contact, even though it isn’t the human I’d prefer to be curled up with. “You’re not much of a furnace at all though,” I add, noticing with concern that Marshall truly is freezing, and doesn’t seem to be warming up quickly at all.
“This is why I need you to keep me warm,” he tells me in reply, lifting his head so that our eyes meet. Even in the darkness, his blue-green-grey eyes are stunning enough to take my breath away, and I quickly drop my gaze, not wanting to be captured in them and lose all of my wits.
After a few moments of silence, Marshall says to me, causing me to look up and meet his stare again, “Pretend that I’m Luke. It will make things less awkward and more comfortable for you, I promise.”
I don’t like the idea of pretending that Marshall is Luke at all, because I know that no one, not even myself, will be able to convince me that anyone besides Luke is Luke, so I respond, “If I pretend that you’re Luke, I’m going to be tempted to strangle you for running away and making us go on this hunt.”
“Dying at your hands would be a whole hell of a lot better than any other death I could experience in this arena,” Marshall shoots back immediately, his response so Luke-esque that I can’t help but wonder if it really would be that hard to convince myself that he’s Luke.
“Marshall, the only thing that will make this less awkward for me is if I pretend that we’re just two friends on a camping trip or something,” I finally resign to telling him. It’s the truth, I guess; however, that will never happen either, so this night is going to be uncomfortable for me no matter what I do. Oh well; at least Marshall won’t freeze and I won’t be left with another dead friend on my conscience.
“Well do that then,” Marshall replies immediately, and I can’t help but smile even as my heart aches almost unbearably. He and Luke are so much alike in their personalities that it’s almost scary; if there was a person who could actually come close to replacing Luke, that person would most definitely be Marshall.
Marshall seems to notice my smirk, for he asks, his expression confused, “What are you smirking for?”
“You just remind me so much of Luke, it’s almost scary,” I tell him, and Marshall bows his head slightly. I guess he’s not so fond of me defining him in terms of Luke. However, I can’t blame him, because I don’t think I’d be very happy if Jackson defined me in terms of Alexa. I think I’d probably flip out and strangle Jackson if that actually happened.
“Well, I’m glad to be your living reminder until we actually find him,” Marshall tells me, giving me a kind smile, but no smile in the world could cover up the sadness and weariness in his eyes. I can’t even imagine how painful this must be for him, finally getting to hold me like he’s wanted to, only to find out that I’m thinking about a different guy. It must be even more painful for Marshall to want me as bad as he does but also know that I’ll never be his, that he’s fighting a battle for my heart that he was never a contender in to begin with.
To be perfectly honest, I think the only way that I would end up with Marshall is if Luke and Jackson both died, and the barrier between my dimension and this dimension never opened again. Now that I think about it, I guess that possibility really isn’t that much of a long shot. Marshall might have a chance with me after all then, although, if that actually does happen, he’ll be getting a broken concrete girl, a spark who’s all burnt out, and I’m not sure he’d even want me at that point.
“We’ll find him soon, Lizzie,” Marshall tells me quietly, his arms wrapping tighter around me as he does so. A part of him probably doesn’t even want to find Luke, because Marshall wants me all to himself for as long as possible.
“I know. I’m just afraid of what else we’ll find when we do,” I reply quietly, and Marshall bows his head again, this time in admittance of the fact that we could very well find something terrible as well as Luke.
“We’ll find him,” Marshall repeats one last time before making his grip on me even tighter, giving me a gentle kiss on the forehead, laying his head down and falling asleep instantly.
As I look over at Marshall and watch his tan, handsome face in the darkness and feel his chest rise and fall against mine, I can’t help but be a little jealous about how he and Luke can just fall asleep instantly like that. It takes me ages to fall asleep generally, and I almost always have nightmares once I do fall asleep, so I would kill to be able to drift off like that without a care in the world and without knowing that there are monsters waiting for you on the other side.
Of course, I’m even less enchanted by the idea of sleep tonight, with knowing that Kuro is in this dimension in the flesh and blood probably not very far from here. The thought that he could be videotaping me right now for that movie he told me he was making crosses my mind, and, before I can dismiss it, an involuntary shiver runs up my spine.
I know I’m being watched all of the time anyways, and that all of this footage will undoubtedly be made into a movie someday, but I can’t help but want Kuro not be one of the people monitoring me. After all, I wouldn’t put it past him to release the complete footage, with everything I’ve done – including the encounter with him in which many of my secrets are revealed – just to cause more chaos and screw with the humans in this dimension.
Kuro has never liked humans in the eight and half thousand years he’s been on this earth, and them losing faith in him and eventually not fearing him or knowing about his existence at all angers him greatly. He thinks that he should be the one being worshiped and having churches built in his name and being feared and revered by half the world, not the Christian notion of God.
Of course, Kuro happens to have – he actually happens to be – proof that that God, or at least a singular, very powerful, transdecendal being who happened to father a semi-mortal child about two thousand years ago, exists, but that doesn’t increase Kuro’s appreciation of that God at all. Kuro does happen to basically be the living antithesis of that God though, presuming that God is all that is good about this universe and the things in it, so I guess he does kind of have a reason to hate that God. Kuro is basically the living embodiment of all evil and badness and barbaric nature in humans’ – and probably other intelligent life forms’ – hearts, while that God is the much-higher, much more powerful, nonphysical embodiment of everything worthwhile in humans: all of their goodness, which means that Kuro, to truly personify evil, basically has to hate that God. Besides, Kuro probably hates himself, somewhere deep down, so the fact that that God created Kuro to keep order in the universe is another reason for Kuro to hate that God.
Kuro has gotten his revenge against that God once or twice though, like when he turned the entire population of Jerusalem against Jesus and was the deciding vote as to whether or not they should kill Jesus instead of the murderer. Kuro also started the Crusades in God’s name, so that’s another blow Kuro’s managed to strike against that God. I personally don’t think Kuro will ever stop trying to get back at that God, as I don’t think Kuro will ever stop internally hating himself, no matter how long he lives or how much he claims to enjoy his job. After all, I think being evil incarnate would be very sad and very lonely, no matter how much of a sociopath you are.
Taking a deep breath and sighing, I pray to whatever God created Kuro that Kuro isn’t watching me right now, then bury my head in Marshall’s shoulder and find myself falling asleep amazingly quickly. The last thing I think before I drift off is that maybe I should keep Marshall around just as a sleep aide.

“Good morning Lizzie,” I hear a voice say as I open my eyes, and I smile, thinking that the person saying it to me is Luke. Then I realize that the voice is wrong, and open my eyes to see Marshall lying next me with a kind smile on his face, and all of my delusions about Luke are swept out of my mind as everything that happened last night comes flooding in.
“Marshall, we have to find Luke,” I tell him frantically, leaping out of the sleeping bag and searching around the tent wildly for my weapons.
“Looking for these?” I whip around to find Marshall, standing – well, as close to standing as you can get in this tent – now too, with my sword in one hand and my bow and quiver in the other.
“Yes, give them back!” I immediately reply, lunging at him to have my hands close on empty air as he sidesteps me.
“Lizzie, you’re not in your right mind,” Marshall tells me emphatically, his expression concerned and his eyes intense. “Hell, you haven’t even eaten in at least a day!”
As soon as he says that, my stomach growls conspicuously and I’m aware of how weak I really am, and I glare at him, as if me not eating is his fault.
After he holds his ground in a staring contest with me for a few seconds, I finally concede to eat something and say, “If I eat, I’m going looking for Luke right afterwards.”
“And I’m coming with you,” Marshall adds. “He’s my partner after all, and I’m not going to leave him to freeze in the snow.”
“You know that he could be dead already, and we just didn’t hear the gunshot?” I ask Marshall, secretly hoping against that possibility with every fiber of my being myself.
He nods his head and replies, “Yeah, I do. I don’t think that actually did happen, with your hearing and there not being a blizzard last night, but I am fully prepared for whatever we might find.” After a moment’s silence, he asks, his eyes locked on mine, almost in a challenge, “Are you?”
“I guess we’ll see,” I answer shortly, then snatch my bow and quiver away from him and exit the tent to find and kill three snow-hare-looking creatures within ten minutes. Well, I guess I don’t really have to worry about going hungry as long as I have my bow.
I come back to the tent, intending to show Marshall my kill and ask if he wants any, to find him crouched over a half-holographic, half-paper map spread out on the floor.
“What is that?” I exclaim in surprise to have him visibly jump, lay a hand on his sword and whip around to look at me. As soon as he sees that it’s me, he removes his hand from his sword, but it takes a few seconds longer for the surprise to leave his face.
“This,” he finally says, gesturing to the map, “is a map of the arena that I received as a gift about five seconds after you left.”
My heart immediately begins to race at the possibilities that map could hold and I can’t ask fast enough, “Does it show where all of the other champions are?”
“Sadly, no,” Marshall replies, and my hope flies out the window. So much for finding Luke the easy way. “However, it does show the contours of the land, major landmarks, and where I am.”
“Where you are?” I ask him curiously, squatting down next to him in order to get a better look at the map. In fact, it does show exactly where he is, with a little red dot labeled “You (Marshall Moore)” on it. That would be very cool if that didn’t mean that the map is tied into the tracking devices we’ve been tagged with.
“Yeah,” he says, gesturing to the little red dot. “It’s pretty nice, because now I can see exactly where I am in the arena, even if it is kind of creepy.” I guess the map being linked to the tracking devices on us didn’t escape him either.
“Well, that’s one more advantage we have over the careers,” I tell him, and he looks up at me like I’m crazy.
“We have advantages over the careers?” he questions in reply, his expression incredulous and skeptical. Thanks for the mental faith, Marshall; it really means a lot to me.
“Yeah, we do,” I tell him, choosing not to chew him out for looking like a doubting deer in the headlights when I said that the first time. “Number one: we’re mobile, and we don’t have a set supply camp that we have to return to all the time. Number two: we’re a smaller group, and therefore a lot harder to track and catch. And number three: that map of yours can help us predict exactly where the careers are.” I gesture to the map, and Marshall meets my gaze questioningly again. Well, I guess it’s better than him continuing to be skeptical.
“How can we know exactly where the careers are? They’d have to be on the map too for that to happen,” he points out, and I shake my head.
“We can use the geography of the land to predict where they’re going to go, if they’re going to move from the Giving Hands at all.” After a moment’s pause, in which time Marshall looks at me expectantly, I continue, “We know they’re not going to come up into the mountains, because moving all of their supplies that far and up that much of an elevation change would just be a stupid move and would leave them incredibly vulnerable while they were moving. We also know they’re not going to go into the forest, because they won’t be able to see potential attackers coming at them with the trees in the way. We also know they’re not going to go into the grasslands for the same reason. That means that the only places left for them to be are the plains out here, which means that we have effectively narrowed down the careers’ potential base camp location to only a fourth of the arena, and that happens to be a lot more than the careers know about where we are,” I finish triumphantly, looking over at Marshall to find him nodding his head in agreement and smirking slightly.
“Well, when you put it that way, we actually might have the upper hand,” he says, and I can’t help but smile along with him. Just because the careers have a bigger group and have more supplies doesn’t mean that they’re strategically better off than the rest of us. Like I proved in One-Person Survival, the careers can be taken out easily if you take out their supplies, which I’m probably going to have to do again this time. Not that I have a problem with completely destroying the careers’ only method of survival.
“We can win this, Marshall,” I tell him, putting conviction into my voice, because I actually have some right now. Of course, there’s always that looming threat of one of us having to die for the other one to win, but we can’t afford to think about that right now. Right now, we’ve got our hands full with just trying to survive.
Suddenly Marshall seems to notice the rabbits on my back and, jerking his chin in the direction of the carcasses, asks, “What do you have there?”
“Breakfast,” I reply, dropping the rabbits on the ground to see an almost animalistic flash of emotion run through Marshall’s eyes that almost scares me. I mean, I’d expect to see something like that in my eyes, considering I actually, at my heart, am an animal, but not in Marshall’s eyes.
However, it has been almost a day since he’s eaten anything, so he must be starving too; I guess it’s a good thing that I went hunting when I did. After all, I’d hate for him to turn cannibalistic – it wouldn’t be cannibalism in my case, since, even though eating humans goes against everything I believe (they just don’t taste very good either) I’m technically not a human – and me have to kill him in self-defense. That actually happened once, in Max’s Triple Crown, if I’m remembering right.
A pair of non-careers – exceptionally stupid non-careers, if you ask me – got themselves stranded in a three-day-long dust storm without any food, water or other supplies – the arena was a desert – and, when the dust storm cleared, there was one non-career and a half of a human body left. Like I said, I would hate for something like that to happen to us; I really wouldn’t want to kill Marshall just because he got hungry and decided I looked like the best food option around.
I mean, I don’t think that would happen unless we committed an incredible act of stupidity or somehow lost all means of survival, and I would trust Marshall with my life – I mean, I have already – but I know that, if worst came to worst, the animalistic instinct would undoubtedly take him over and I would just look like another prey animal to him.
I don’t think that would happen to me though, just because I’ve spent so long keeping my animal instinct locked inside of me that I don’t even know if it’s possible for me to lose control like that. Jackson’s capable of losing control, because he hasn’t been away from the animal part of him for nearly as long as I have, but I think that it would take a lot more than getting stranded somewhere with no means for survival to make me eat human. I mean, it’s not like I can die from hunger anyways, and I know I’d much rather go hungry than eat a friend; besides, I have means of survival as long as I have my hands, my feet,, my teeth, and my shapeshifting abilites. Things like a bow or a knife aren’t really necessary for me to hunt. They’re more just for show, to keep people from being suspicious. After all, I think people would be a little wary of me if I told them I went hunting with just my hands and teeth; they might actually begin to suspect of being the animal I am, if you can believe that.
“Here,” Marshall says, pulling me out of my thoughts after a few moments, and I look up just in time to catch a lighter. “There should be dry, fallen wood underneath the trees,” he tells me, and I nod my head. I don’t need him giving me survival or fire-starting lessons – I think I’ve already proved that I’m more adept than him at both of those – but I’m not going to argue with him right now; all that will do is waste time, time that Luke doesn’t have.
It doesn’t take me long to gather wood – there’s lots of it underneath the trees, just like Marshall said there would be – and I light a fire quickly, aiding the flames by urging them to get bigger with my element-controlling powers. In no time, I am rotating a fully skinned and gutted rabbit over the blaze, with an almost-drooling Marshall standing next to me, his stomach grumbling loud enough that I think I could probably hear it from a half a mile away, no joke.
“That smells so good,” he says, inhaling the scent of the roasting meat deeply, longingly and with anticipation. To be perfectly honest, he reminds me of a dog waiting for a bone.
“Keep your tongue in your mouth, will you?” I tease him. “The rabbit won’t cook as fast if you’re drooling into the fire and putting the flames out.” I turn and look at him for a moment, giving him a smirk, to find him with an almost abashed expression on his face.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, dropping his gaze to the snow for a moment. “I’m just really hungry.”
“I can see that,” I say sarcastically, then turn my attention back to the rabbit to find that it’s fully cooked and ready for us to eat.
After pulling it off the makeshift spit carefully – and only burning half of my fingers in the process – I offer half of it to Marshall, and he almost lunges for it, he’s so eager to have some.
“Bon appetit,” I say, and give him a smile before taking a bite into my rabbit. It’s good for a rabbit, not nearly as stringy as other rabbits I’ve eaten; I guess I know where to go if I’m looking for quality rabbit meat: the mountains.
I look up momentarily to find that Marshall hasn’t even touched his, which strikes me as very odd, considering his self-proclaimed starvation and ask him, “What’s the matter? Rabbit too hot to eat?” My mouth is also not a very good judge of temperature, considering I’ve eaten so many strange things at so many different temperatures over the years that my taste buds have bascially become accustomed to temperatures that would freeze or burn other people’s mouths.
“What language was that?” Marshall asks me, and I sigh. I should have known I was going to get asked about that, considering that he’s also a self-proclaimed language nut.
“French,” I answer, then pause for a moment, not knowing what else to say. I mean, I don’t know if they still speak French – although I think Marshall would have at least heard of the language if it was still commonly used – since they don’t speak Spanish any more, so I don’t know if there’s anything else I accurately can say. “It’s an old language,” I finally add – I mean, that’s true in my dimension, and we’re three thousand years in the past from this dimension – and Marshall nods his head in understanding, his eyes still glued to my face and filled with an incredible want for knowledge. I think he would make a great college professor, if he gets out of here and has a chance to actually be one.
“I’ve never heard it before,” Marshall tells me, his gaze locked on mine curiously. I can feel him trying – and failing – to suck all of my linguistic knowledge out through my eyes, and I can’t help but smile slightly. To him, I’m probably like a living textbook, a record of long-lost languages that he’s been searching for his whole life. Too bad I’m going to die without him writing down every lost language that I know. Finally, after a few moments of silence, he asks, “What is with you and ancient languages? It seems like I can’t turn around without you speaking in a language that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Deciding to lie to keep things safe – and my lie isn’t really even a lie, since my parents are language nuts like Marshall; they were just around when many of these languages were being created – I tell him, “My parents are serious language nuts, even more so than you are.” I give him a smile before adding, “They live and breathe ancient languages, and, since I’m in the same house as them, I guess I’ve breathed in some of their ancient languages too.”
Marshall smiles slightly at me smiling at him and at what I said – probably at me smiling at him more than anything though – before replying, “Yeah, I never really had much free time to look into ancient languages, with working in the forges and training for the Triple Crown and all.” Marshall looks over at me momentarily, and I nod, his mention of the forges reminding me of something – well, someone – I haven’t really thought of in a while.
“I think you would like my ex-boyfriend Troy. He’s a language nut and blacksmith too,” I say, and can’t resist adding, “You guys have so much in common, maybe you should date.”
Marshall smiles weakly at my joke – obviously that would never happen, considering that he and Troy are both straight and both still hung up on me – and responds, “He sounds like a pretty cool guy. I think you have to be a pretty cool guy to catch your attention though.”
Feeling his gaze on the side of my face, I say quietly, with a half-abashed smile, “Yeah,” to feel the intensity of his gaze jump up exponentially.
“What was he like, your ex?” Marshall asks me, and I look up to meet his gaze curiously and see bitterness and longing in his eyes. Well, if he wants to jump in and make life harder on himself, I guess I should tell him. Besides, it’s not like he has much to be jealous of; I didn’t really love Troy any more than I love Marshall.
“Well, he’s very tall – seven feet even – and very strong – four-sport athlete, can run a mile in abut four minutes and bench about four hundred pounds, all that stuff. He’s also very handsome – trust me,” I say, smiling slightly at the dubious look on Marshall’s face, “that’s a fact that’s been proven by numerous polls-” – with him and I both being Olympic-caliber athletes and sort of a celebrity couple, People and a bunch of magazines like that did numerous polls about us – “-and he’s also very intelligent. He and I were basically a perfect match, compatible in every aspect, and some people even thought we would be together all throughout high school and college and eventually get married. He definitely wanted that; in fact, he even told me once that he would buy a ring and propose to me right then if there wouldn’t be so much societal backlash.”
“But you didn’t want that?” Marshall asks me, his eyes glued to the side of my face, and I nod my head in confirmation.
“No,” I reply simply, shaking my head. “It’s not that Troy wasn’t good enough for me – if anything, he was too good for me – I just never truly loved him. I thought I was, and maybe even believed in my heart that I was in love with him, but I was more in love with the idea of being in love than anything else. After a while – a year and about six months, to be exact – I decided that I didn’t want to pretend anymore, and I dumped him. Well, I did let him down pretty easy, so I don’t know if ‘dumped’ is quite the right word.”
“What did you tell him?” Marshall questions, and I look over at him to find him watching me earnestly before answering.
“That he was perfect for me, but that he wasn’t what I wanted,” I respond quietly. After a moment’s pause, a bitter smile flits across my face and I add, “Isn’t it funny how history repeats itself? First with Troy, then with Luke.”
“But you actually love Luke,” Marshall says, and I glance over at him in amazement and confusion. I thought he was supposed to be winning my heart, not trying to affirm my relationship with another guy. Oh, right, Marshall is also one of those very weird and very rare guys that will actually give me the complete truth and not try to manipulate me. “And don’t say that you don’t, because I see it in your eyes when you look at him, and the way your face lights up when you see him, and the way you kiss him like you can’t get enough of him.” Marshall’s voice gets choked off by emotion, and I look over at him again to find him clenching his fists and obviously trying hard not to punch something. It must be terrible, saying all of those increibly true things and wishing with all of his heart that he could be using ‘I’ and ‘me’ instead of ‘he’ in that sentence.
“I didn’t originally love him though,” I reply, and Marshall’s expression loses some of its anger. “Luke’s kind of...crept up on me during the course of the Triple Crown, so much so that now I don’t know what I’d do if he died and I lived. I think I’d probably spend the rest of my life trying to make it so that we were both dead.”
“And that’s why you want to die in here, right?” Marshall prompts, and I nod my head.
“Yeah. That way I can be sure that I die, since you never know what the Triple Crown committee will do. For all I know, they would paralyze me, but leave me fully capable of knowing that Luke is dead and that I’m helpless to take my own life and join him, just to torture me for all of the things I did to spite them.” I find my own hands balling into fists at that thought, since I know that the Triple Crown committee certianly could and maybe even would do something like that to me, just as their own personal, screwed-up way of getting revenge. Death would be a lot more merciful than that, to be perfectly honest.
“And you get to control your death in here,” Marshall adds, and I nod my head in agreement.
“I actually can be the spark if I die in here,” I finish, and now it’s Marshall’s turn to nod his head. I feel his gaze on the side of my cheek and sigh, not able to not think that it would be so much easier on him if he would just forget me and move on, or – better yet – never have fallen in love with me in the first place. After all, love in a place like this only makes things more painful and screws things up even more.
“Is this really what you want?” Marshall asks me quietly, and I look over at him inquisitively. “Is this death by martydom – bleeding for the world, basically, and choosing to be the scapegoat – really what you want?”
“It doesn’t really matter what I want anymore, Marshall, because I’ve committed myself too greatly to this cause to choose a different fate now,” I reply quietly, bitterness tingeing my tone and emphasizing my words.
“You’re not answering my question, Lizzie, because I’m not asking you if you can get what you want. I’m asking you what you want, regardless of whether it’s possible now or not,” he tells me, and I look up to meet his gaze and see the raw intensity and emotion in his brilliant blue-green eyes. “So is this really what you want?”
“Well, it’s definitely one of the best ways to die, and, seeing as I’m going to die sometime, why not die like this? At least I’m helping someone if I die this way.” When I see Marshall open his mouth to protest that that’s not really an answer either, I add quickly, a hint of a smile on my face, “That’s a yes, Marshall.”
Marshall, however, doesn’t smile or nod his head, like I thought he would. Instead, he stares over at me with almost awe on his face. “So dying like this is really what you want, what you would do even if you had different options?”
“Yeah,” I reply immediately, then elaborate, “Like I told Luke once: everyone has to be something in this world, Marshall. I guess I’m the martyr.” After a moment’s pause, I add, “Besides, all I want is to make a change in the world, and I’d say I’m making a pretty big change in a lot of people’s lives by doing this. I’m granting people the freedom they weren’t strong enough to get by themselves.”
Here Marshall nods his head in understanding, although his expression is still slightly stunned and his eyes are still clouded in thought.
Suddenly I realize that, during the course of our conversation, the fire’s gone out, and that I’m not really hungry any more, so I toss the rest of my rabbit – I did eat about half of it – at Marshall to rise to my feet and tell him, “I’m going looking for Luke. You can stay behind if you want.”
“You honestly think I would?” Marshall asks me incredulously, and I bow my head slightly in defeat. No, I didn’t actually think he would, but I thought I should at least give him the option of staying behind and opting not to witness a potential breakdown or be in the middle of a hurricane or electric storm that I cause.
Realizing that we still have two fully cooked, uneaten halves of rabbits, I glance around for something to wrap them up in to find that there’s nothing. After all, it’s not like we’re going to find those huge green, waxy leaves like there were in the rainforest out here in the snow. Wait, the snow...
“I think we’re not going to be able to keep the meat we didn’t eat on us. I’ll have to bury it in the snow for it to stay fresh,” I tell Marshall, and he nods his head. Apparently the same thoughts occurred to him; he would flipping out and asking me frantically why if they hadn’t, because meat – and all food in general – is such a precious commodity out here in the Triple Crown.
“It’s a shame, that we can’t take the meat with us,” Marshall murmurs as he watches me bury the two rabbit halves in a three-foot snow drift about ten feet away from our tent. “One of those abominable snowmen you’re related to can come up and take our meat this way.” I look up sharply to find him smirking down at me, his eyes twinkling, and I can’t help but smile back. In his own, completely different way from Luke and Jackson, Marshall really is completely irresistible.
“Was it the big feet that gave it away?” I ask him, joining in the teasing and feeling my smile get exponentially bigger as I do so. Marshall’s right; it really has been a while since I’ve truly smiled.
“That, and you laying in the snow for almost six hours and not freezing to death.” Suddenly Marshall’s tone has gone from teasing to completely inquisitive, and I meet his gaze carefully. Marshall’s only to get more questions than answers out of starting this, whether I choose to answer or not. “How did you do that, Lizzie? That’s not humanly possible.” He stares me down, and, for the first time, I realize how truly poweful those blue-green eyes can be. I can feel myself wanting to bend to his will underneath their stern gaze.
“I have a... condition, I guess you could call it,” I reply, rising to my feet to gain ground on him and get a better hold of myself in our staring contest. “My body temperature is about three degrees higher than the average human, and it won’t change, no matter what I do.”
“So basically you can’t get cold?” Marshall says, and I nod my head in confirmation, smiling slightly at the amazed look on his face as I do so. I’d think, after all the things he’s seen me do and all of the things he’s learned about me and my past, that finding out I have an abnormally high body temperature wouldn’t amaze him that much. I guess he finds my anatomy more fascinating than I realized.
“That’s amazing,” Marshall replies, his expression still stunned and almost reverent now as he looks me up and down with a renewed interest. “It’s like you have homeostasis to the max.”
I can’t help but laugh at that last comment, and, when I’m coherent enough to speak again, I reply, “Way to go out of your way to quote Biology.”
“Hey, I passed that class with a hundred and two percent. I have rights to quote it as much as I want,” he tells me, and I burst out laughing again. Now Marshall’s just proving the point that he’s irresistible.
“Oh man, I love you Marshall,” I find myself saying when I stop giggling, and suddenly the air around us changes completely to have all of its frivolity replaced by sheer amazement and emotion. Surprised by the change and wondering what could have made it, I look up at Marshall to find him staring at me with an amazed, intense look on his face.
Without waiting for me to ask, “What?” he says quietly, his tone amazed, hopeful and apprehensive, “You just said, ‘I love you’ to me. Do you... do you mean that?” He meets my gaze again, his eyes pleading me to say yes, and it’s a few moments before I finally do respond.
“Yeah, I do,” I murmur in reply, my eyes locked on his, to see hope and joy blossom in his expression and a huge smile spread out across his face. I think he probably would have run at me and kissed me right then and there if I hadn’t added quickly, “But like a friend, or a brother even. Not like the way you love me, Marshall.”
It feels like my heart is being ripped out of my chest when I see Marshall’s face fall, and, sighing deeply, I turn away from him. It’s too painful to look at him and know I caused that pain; I guess I won’t be looking at him for a while then.
After a few moments of incredibly awkward silence, during which time I’m staring off into the snow and Marshall’s eyes are boring holes into the back of my neck, he finally says, trying to make his tone sound upbeat but only sounding defeated, “Well, I guess you loving me like that is better than how it used to be, how you didn’t love me at all.”
“Yeah,” I respond, not able to keep the bitterness and exasperation out of me voice. What he doesn’t understand is that me loving him is actually going to make it just that much harder on both of us, because he’s only going to want me more and I’m only going to want to bleed for him more, neither one of which is particularly good. “Sure,” I add, feeling the air around us lose the fake optimism Marshall put in it to just be cold, kind of like our relationship.
After a few more moments go by in an almost restless silence, both of us waiting for the other one to say something, I finally grow tired of waiting, and, without turning towards him again, tell him, “Come on. We need to go find Luke.” I then turn and leave our campsite, not bothering to wait for Marshall to follow me. In the end, he never does.

“Luke!” I cry as soon as I see his blonde head sticking out of a snowbank, my heart filling with relief and happiness at the fact that, after two hours of searching, I’ve finally found him. However, all of my happiness flies out the wind at the fact that Luke is lying in a snowbank, and, coming to my senses, I run towards him in a panic.
I know that he could very well be dead already – maybe the Triple Crown committee ordered that a gunshot not go off and that his body not get eaten by the dirt so they can rub his death (and therefore their victory over me) in my face – but, as I try to brace myself for whatever could be waiting for me when I see him, I know that no amount of bracing myself will actually make any difference. I will be just as torn up if he’s dead whether I tell myself not to calm down or not.
“Luke,” I murmur when I reach him and drop to my knees next to him, my hands balling into fists and my heart creeping up into my throat as I see the huge gash across his ribs, probably only a few inches below his heart. It’s only by luck that Luke hasn’t frozen or bled to death yet – he’s still breathing at least – and I know, with absolute certainty, that he will die if I don’t try to patch him up, and may die even if I do.
“Lizzie,” Luke whispers, his ice-blue eyes, normally so clear but now clouded with pain, popping open and a weak smile stretching across his face as he sees me. “You came for me,” he says quietly, his voice so full of joy that I think my heart’s going to burst from pain, and I nod my head in reply, not trusting myself to speak.
After a few moments, I’ve finally regained control of my voice, and, trying to sound brave and strong and unshaken – basically everything I’m not right now – tell him, “Well it’s not like I was going to let you freeze in the snow. I can’t believe you thought I’d let you get off that easy for ditching me.”
Luke’s smile gets slightly bigger, and he reaches his hand up to find one of mine and give it a feeble squeeze. “How foolish of me,” he replies, playing along with the joke, and, even though I know that he’s very close to death and every second he goes untreated is every second closer to me losing him, I can’t help but smile too, and bend down over him to kiss his gently.
After a few long, desperate moments, I pull back to give Luke another smile and ask him gently, “What happened?”
“It was Hunter and Marissa,” Luke tells me, and immediately I know that my hunch about what happened is correct. I guess that means Luke really did hold off and kill Hunter then. “They tracked Abby and I after we ran away from that... presence-” – I can’t help but notice that Luke talks about the presence aka Kuro with more fear than he talks about Hunter and Marissa, even though he almost died, and may, in the end, die because of them – “-and finally they caught up to us up here. I told Abby to run when they finally cornered us, but Marissa followed her and left Hunter alone with me. I ran away from him for a little while longer, then got tired of running, turned to face him, and took him out after about five minutes of fighting, even though I got nicked up pretty badly.” He glances down at the huge slash covering most of his torso, and I idly think that I don’t even want to know what he classifies as ‘severely injured’ if this is only ‘nicked up pretty badly’.
“I’m guessing Abby didn’t have nearly as good luck with Marissa though,” he ends, looking up at me, and I nod my head slightly, my face falling involuntarily at the memory of Abby’s death. Even though Puck did announce her name for all of the world to hear and recognize it as meaning that she’s dead, I guess Luke didn’t catch it because he was passed out in a snowbank, attempting to die on me.
A few moments go by in silence until Luke finally asks the question on his mind – it’s not really my fault that I’m in his mind; he’s a really loud thinker. “Did you take Marissa out?” He meets my gaze, a sort of morbid curiosity in his eyes, and I nod. “Good,” he says, his tone slightly satisfied. “It’s no more than she deserved.”
“It’s a whole lot less than she deserved,” I can’t help but add, and now it’s Luke’s turn to nod his head in agreement.
“I don’t think there’s a torture bad enough on earth to make up for all of the things she did,” Luke murmurs, and, as I nod my head again, I am about to allow myself to get lost in my own mind and think about how Marissa Evans went wrong when I come to my senses and realize that Luke is the far more pressing issue here.
“Luke, we have to get you out of here,” I tell him, trying not to let the panic I’m feeling creep its way into my voice, and I bend down over him to carefully remove his backpack, sling it on my back and pick him up in my arms and notice, with concern, how much thinner he feels. I guess I’m not the only one who needs to be eating more now, although I guess he does have the excuse of being thrown into a frozen wasteland where food is very hard to come by.
“I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m the one who’s supposed to be doing this,” Luke mutters, and I can’t help but smile slightly.
However, I don’t say anything in reply, as I’m too preoccupied with my thoughts of Luke dying in my arms, and a few long, silent minutes pass before Luke finally says something again.
“Is Marshall with you?” Luke asks me, looking up at me curiously and worriedly, and I force myself to keep my expression in check. It would do no good for Luke to know about the little spat Marshall and I got in before I came looking for him.
“Yeah,” I reply shortly, not able to keep all of the tenseness out of voice, but thankfully Luke has the sense – and the knowledge of me – to not ask me anything about it when it’s obvious that I don’t want to talk.
After about fifteen minutes of silence, Marshall’s and my camp finally comes into view, and I look down at Luke momentarily to tell him, “We’re here.”
I then look back up to call out towards the tent, “Marshall! Marshall, I’ve got Luke!” and hesitate momentarily to listen for an answer. When none comes, I force myself to keep the concern off of my face and march towards the tent, thinking that Marshall better have a damn good reason for not answering.
When I come up to the tent, setting Luke down gently off to one side but not gently enough to stop him from groaning in pain, and pull the tent flap aside, I see that Marshall does in fact have a damn good reason for not answering. He has headphones in his ears, apparently plugged into the map he’s studying, and, as I look over his shoulder, I find him drawing some sort of lines on the map – potential career movements?
When I shift forward to get a better look at what he’s doing, my knee bumps Marshall’s back some, and he lets out a strangled cry of surprise to whip around to face me. When he sees that it’s me, he stops panicking some and takes a few deep breaths, and, as he pulls out his headphones out of his ears, he shakes his head at me.
“My God, you nearly gave me a heart attack!” Marshall tells me as soon as he can hear me, and I at least have the dignity to look abashed here. However, my abashedness doesn’t remove the grim look from my face, which causes Marshall to ask, his expression now becoming concerned as well, “What’s the matter?”
“It’s Luke,” I answer quietly, and Marshall immediately knows what I’m talking about. Without waiting for me to say anything else, he exits the tent quickly, and I follow suit, waiting for him to choke back a cry of surprise and horror like I did when I first saw Luke.
However, no such cry escapes Marshall’s lips. Instead, he merely tells Luke, as he manages a half-smile, “Man, you got yourself pretty dinged up, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess I did,” Luke agrees, returning Marshall’s grin, although neither one of theirs looks pain-free or real.
“At least you took out Hunter though. We won’t have to deal with him anymore, thanks to you,” Marshall says, looking over at me as a prompt, and I quickly nod my head in agreement.
“You did great Luke,” I murmur sincerely, my eyes locking on his as I give him a small, sad smile. I can’t help but wonder, every time I talk to him now, if that will be the last thing I say to him, the last communication I ever have with the boy who currently possesses more than fifty percent of my heart.
“It’s funny, how you guys like to lie to keep me happy,” Luke says quietly, not looking amused at all, and immediately my heart plummets. He shouldn’t be saying things like that; no, he should be saying that he didn’t do that great, and that he just got lucky, not decrying the fact that he did anything at all. I’m the only one who gets to say things like that!
“We’re not lying, Luke,” I tell him, my tone harsher than I had originally intended for it to be. Oh well; maybe he’ll get the message quicker by realizing how serious I really am. “You did an amazing thing, and it’s our place to thank you for it.”
“So killing another person is an amazing thing?” Luke shoots back, stunning me into silence. It’s amazing how much our roles have switched around in this Triple Crown: he’s become cynical like me, and I’ve tried to tell him things that may or may not be true to keep him happy like him. Actually, now that I think about it, he’s become a lot more cynical than I have become happy-word-distributing, so I guess that means that we’re both basically becoming or staying as me. Holy crap, we have another serious problem, besides Luke dying.
“It’s better than dying,” Marshall replies, sparing me from having to answer, and I make a mental note to thank God and/or Marshall for his quick thinking and excellent rebuttal skills.
“Oh really?” Luke replies, and I note again, with even more worry this time, how much he truly is sounding like me, which isn’t a good thing at all. “Who’s to say that my life is worth more than Hunter’s life? Who’s to put a value on human existence?” Luke looks between Marshall and me, his gaze daring one of us to reply. Unfortunately for Luke, Marshall actually takes him up on that dare.
“Either you die or he dies, Luke, so wouldn’t you rather it be you?” Marshall shoots back, stunning Luke into a momentary silence. “I mean, Hunter would have undoubtedly died sometime in the next three weeks anyways, even if you hadn’t killed him yesterday, so you wouldn’t have been saving him at all by sparing him and letting him kill you. You would’ve just gotten yourself killed and prolonged Hunter’s suffering out here.” Marshall gestures to the frozen wasteland around us, and I can’t help but smile at the stunned and almost indignant expression on Luke’s face. I guess he didn’t really plan for this argument to go like it has. “You did Hunter a favor if you did him anything at all, Luke. You can’t fault yourself for that,” Marshall ends, and Luke looks down and drops his head as a sign of submission, that he’s admitting that he lost the argument.
“Now come on, let’s get you inside,” Marshall says, and, scoops Luke up in his arms to march towards the tent again.

[Sonmi-451]

More added.

“Luke’s dying,” I murmur quietly as I stare into the flames lighting the darkness around Marshall and me, my hands balling into fists involuntarily at the thought of losing Luke. I cleaned Luke’s wounds and patched him to the best of my ability a few hours ago, and, having as much experience with death as I do, I know that he’s on his way out unless I can find an antibiotic to fight off the infection taking him over. However, I know that I can’t let him go, I just can’t, because a good chunk of my heart will go with him and leave me even emptier than I am now. “And there’s nothing I can do to heal him.”
Marshall has opened his mouth and is just about to say something in response – undoubtedly a lie that’s about how we’ll find a way to save Luke and there’s no reason for me to worry – when the snowy ground in front of me opens with a hideous scraping sound to reveal a folded sheet of paper.
“What the hell...?” I exclaim quietly, staring at the paper dubiously. Undoubtedly it’s something from Max, a map message or piece of useful information maybe, but, considering all the help Max has given me so far in Team Survival – as in, zero – I’m not very eager to pick it up and unfold it.
“Do you want me to...?” Marshalls asks me, gesturing towards the paper, and, for a half-second, I’m tempted to take him up on his offer and say yes.
However, I know that whatever’s on the paper has to be for me and that I should be the first one to read it, so, after taking a moment to steel myself and fight back my anger against Max, I dismiss Marshall’s offer with a wave of my hand and say, “No. It’s mine, so I should be the one to open it.”
I then reach out, pick the paper up with a slightly shaking hand, and do just that to find, written in Max’s crude handwriting, a command.
“Look in Hunter’s bag,” I read aloud, and immediately toss the note aside with a snort of contempt. Marshall and I already did look through Hunter’s bag, and pulled out everything of value: food, water jugs, clothes and hot packs to keep our hands and extremities warm. In fact, the only thing we didn’t take out of the bag was a small vial of clear liquid, which we thought, given that Hunter was a career, might be some sort of chemical bomb.
“Wait...” I think aloud, leaping to my feet and running inside the tent to pull the vial out of Hunter’s bag, giving Luke sleeping the corner a glance to make sure that he wasn’t waken up by my entrance. When I confirm that he is still in fact dozing, I hold the vial up to see that there can’t be more than fifteen milliliters of completely clear liquid inside the little glass tube. After a few seconds of examining it and swirling the liquid around, I finally come to the conclusion that I don’t have anything to lose, and decide to open it.
With some difficulty, I warily uncork it – it doesn’t explode upon contact with the air, which is a promising start – and take a whiff to smell a cacophony of herbal smells, underlied by a faint, familiar scent that I just can’t put my finger on. An explosive chemical cocktail wouldn’t smell like herbs and something else familiar, right?
After a few moments of looking back and forth between Luke and the vial, I eventually think what the hell, what’s left for me to lose, if it is a bomb at least we’ll both blow up together, and bend down over Luke to carefully trickle the contents of the vial into his mouth. Immediately some color returns to his deathly-pale face, and he begins to look alive again.
“Oh my God,” I whisper, staring down at the vial in my hand. I can save Luke, if I can get my hands on more of this stuff, and, considering that the careers have more than three-quarters of the supplies in Team Survival, I know exactly where I can get more.
Quickly I throw a pack of supplies on my back, gather up all of my supplies, and dart out of the tent to tell Marshall, who’s giving me a curious, worried look, “I’ve found a way to save Luke that involves raiding the careers’ camp.”
On a whim, I pick up the note I tossed aside out of the snow and am about to stand up when I notice that my black lightning bolt, the supersuit and switchblade in disguise, is sitting in the snow where the ground originally peeled away to reveal Max’s note. I guess Marshall didn’t notice its appearance, as he seems to be just as surprised as I am when I slip into my pocket.
I then stand up and am about to fold the note up and put it in my pocket with my lightning bolt when I notice that the writing on it has changed. Unfolding it again, I can’t help but smile as I read the new message.
Go get ‘em, Lightning.

“This is it, this is my chance to save Luke,” I murmur to myself as I stare out at the careers’ camp. It’s quiet, almost too quiet, with no guard out front, although I guess it is almost midnight and the careers aren’t expecting anyone to attack them on their own turf. You’d think that they might have revised that policy of cockiness for Team Survival, considering that I actually did attack their camp during One-Person Survival, but I’m not complaining. It will just make raiding their supplies that much easier.
I am just about to creep forward and make a run for their supply pile, which seems to be completely unguarded, when my eyes pick up something metallic glinting in the snow. Squatting down to take a closer look, I find, with horror – since I almost ran into it – a trip wire attached to two land mines dug up from the ankle cuffs. I guess they decided to try to turn my strategy against me this time, and they almost had me too.
However, with the location they have the grenades positioned in, they would end up blowing themselves and their supplies up if someone actually did activate the trip wire. I guess that means that it’s almost an ingenious plan; they just need to move the grenades farther away from their supply pile and their tents, unless they plan on blowing up with the supplies.
If it weren’t for the fact that I need to get some more of that medicine for Luke, I would back up and throw a snowball at the trip wire to activate it and take out the careers and their supplies quickly and easily. I probably will do that, after I get Luke’s medicine.
I skirt around and over all three of the trip wires they have set up easily, which my eyes have no problem picking out against the whiteness of the snow. As soon as I have a clear path to the supply pile, I approach the mountain, and carefully look it over, trying to find packs identical to the one Hunter had, to pull out two packs after a few seconds of observation.
I unzip both of them warily, giving my surroudings a glance as I do so, to stick my hands in them and have my fingers find two small glass vials in each of them. Sighing slightly in relief – I’ll have to thank Max for this later – I pull five more packs out of the pile to steal the vials out of them and put the vials in the first two packs I grabbed. I’d love to take all five packs – I mean, it’s not like you can really ever have too many supplies, unless you have so many that you have a mountain you have to booby-trap – but I don’t have enough shoulders and arms to carry them all with, and too many supplies will just slow me down and make me vulnerable. I toss the five looted packs onto the pile, and turn around to immediately feel the wind whip up around me and have snow driven into my eyes.
Squinting through the sheets of white, I find that, even with my eyes, I can barely see ten feet in front of me because of this instanteous blizzard that has to be a production of the Triple Crown committee. After all, normal blizzards don’t just start in five seconds, and the timing – clearly the Triple Crown committee is trying to get me lost and/or in a fight with the careers – is too perfect for this storm to be natural. I guess the only good thing about this storm is that the cameras and microphones are going to be able to see and hear less than I do, which means that, if worst comes to worst and I really do have to fight the careers, I have a cover for summoning more wind and more lightning. After all, a little more wind isn’t going to look out of place when the blizzard’s raging at at least fifty miles an hour, and the lightning could be easily mistaken for me using my supersuit to blow up something. For once, I have the perfect cover for being me.
Unfortunately, this storm, while being an excellent cover, also happens to be stopping me from seeing where the trip wires are. Sighing and reminding myself to cuss out the Triple Crown committee the next chance I get, I shrug one of the packs off my shoulders to pull out a lighter and flick it open, creating a tiny flame that instantly illuminates everything around me. That also means that it instantly illuminated me, so any person within a few hundred yards of me – aka the careers – can see me clearly, even with the blizzard, as the light seems to shine through the snow. I guess that means I’ll just have to be quick about using the flame to locate the trip wires and get out of here.
Squatting down, I hold the flame out in front of me to find the first trip wire mere inches from my hand. Keeping the lighter close to the trip wire so I don’t lose sight of where it is and end up triggering it, I step over it carefully, then turn my attention to the ground in front of me, where the next trip wire waits.
I do the same thing for that one too, and am just about to step over the third one and make a run for it when a light flips on inside the last tent, illuminating a standing human figure, and an excited voice that is unmistakably Danica’s says, “It looks like we have a visitor.”
The human figure points towards me, and, recovering from my momentary shock quickly, I leap over the third trip wire to begin to run.
Unfortunately, Danica’s almost as fast as me, and she started from in front of me to begin with, so, after a moment, I find myself skidding to a stop and staring down the barrel of a gun pointed at me by a smirking Danica, a light hanging around her neck that illuminates everything around us. Immediately I flip my lighter out and slide it into my pocket, since there’s no need to give her more light to see by, especially when I have the advantage of night-vision.
“I knew you’d come,” Danica murmurs, her eyes locked on mine. In the low light, with the snow whirling around her and a rifle in her hand, she looks almost mad, like she just broke out of a mental hospital.
Even though that gun can’t hurt me – well, I guess she could shoot it at me and it could hit me, but it’s not like it would do any damage; the more likely possibility is that, if she does fire it at me, I redirect the bullet by twisting the air around us or I just jump out of the way (amazing wolf reflexes) – the expression on her face is enough to send shivers up my spine. It’s one that says she won’t stop until I’m dead, or she dies trying to kill me.
“How’s Marshall doing?” she asks me, a smirk on her face as she stares me down. She has the definite advantage here, especially now that her fellow careers are waking up, grabbing their weapons, and coming out to surround me, and she knows it too. “Have you killed him yet?” My hands ball into fists at what Danica’s suggesting – as if I would mutiny against the one person willing to die for me who doesn’t really even know me; well, I guess Luke’s in that company too, but he won’t get a chance to die for me unless I get back to the camp with the medicine to heal him – and I can’t stop the gutteral snarl building up inside of me from escaping my lips.
Danica laughs at that, and the other careers – much to my surprise, there are only two others; it’s amazing that the other ones all got killed off already – join in, but I can sense the nervousness in her laugh. Some part of her probably knows that my snarl wasn’t human, and that she doesn’t have the psychological advantage at all. In fact, she and the other careers just don’t have an advantage at all.
“So, Lightning, I guess this is it. Now you’ll finally get to know what it’s like to die, except you’ll stay dead, unlike me.” A crazy smile, one that definitely makes me think she should be in a mental institution right now, creeps across her face, and she raises the rifle in her hand to aim it at my heart.
“Goodbye, Lightning,” she says quietly, her eyes locked on mine. “Not like anyone’s going to miss you.” As if in slow-motion, I see her fingers tense on the trigger, and, a nanosecond before she actually can fire it, I leap into action.

Running at Danica and taking her by surprise, I feel the bullet that originally had my name on it whistle by my ear and then imbed itself, with a slight boom, in the supply pile. When I reach Danica, I punch her swiftly in the nose and in the stomach, causing her to double over, unconscious, and drop the gun, which I immediately pick up. Hefting the rifle in my hands, I aim it at the other two careers, who are currently standing there in shock, to have them run at me, one falling behind the other so that they form a sort of line.
As soon as they move towards me, I fire at the first one to have him fall over, dead, and hear two gunshots that aren’t mine go off. Wait, two gunshots? I only shot the first career, so why on earth would there be two gunshots going off?
My question is immediately answered when I see the second career falling to the ground, blood spurting out of a wound in her chest. I didn’t realize the bullet was moving fast enough to go all the way through the first career and take out the second career as well, as the rifle seemed pretty old and therefore like it didn’t have that much muzzle velocity to me, but I guess I was wrong.
I have dropped the gun and am just about to walk away, the packs slung over my back and my heart slightly heavy at killing two more people, when I hear something move behind me and whip around to find Danica rising to her feet, the gun in her hands again.
“You’re supposed to be unconscious,” I tell her, my hands balling into fists at my stupidity. Why on earth didn’t I move the gun out of her reach when I dropped it, to prevent something like this from happening?
“And you’re supposed to be dead, because I’m supposed to have shot you a minute ago,” Danica immediately replies, her eyes locked on mine. If her expression was wild and crazy before, she must be downright insane now. “That doesn’t matter now though, because you’re dead either way.”
She lifts the gun up to aim it straight at my heart, a psychotic smile curling her lips. “Did you honestly think you could ever beat us, Lightning? No matter how tough you are, no matter how many people you can kill, no matter how good a survivor you are, you can never beat us, because we are the embodiment of survival skills, of raw want to stay alive, of pure human instinct, and there is nothing more powerful than instinct. You may be more civilized and more intelligent than we are, but that doesn’t mean you have an advantage on us at all. We are the true survivors, Lightning, not you, because we are fully prepared to take out anything in our path.”
“Danica, you and your career cronies don’t know the definition of true survivor,” I tell her, boring holes into her eyes with my powerful gaze. “You are opportunists with incredibly enlarged senses of self-preservation, but that doesn’t mean you know how to survive at all; no, all that means is that you don’t know the true purpose of survival. You don’t know that mental and spiritual survival, as in dying for the ideas you live for, is far more important than physical survival, than merely staying alive. After all, what point is there to staying alive if suffering and hatred is all that awaits you? This ignorance of yours does not make you strong, Danica. It merely makes you selfish.”
It’s a few moments before Danica recovers from her shock enough to manage a half-hearted sneer and say, “Well, that ignorance is letting me win this fight of life-or-death with you, so I’d say you’re the one who’s ignorant, Lightning.”
“And you just proved my point,” I add calmly, a smile stretching across my face as I stare her down.
Finally, after a few long moments of silence, she loses her calm and the staring contest, and bursts out, “Enough with this! You’re annoying me, so let’s shut you up, shall we?”
“Be my guest, Danica,” I tell her quietly, an infernal smirk that must just be driving her crazy painted across my face. I can’t die because her bullet won’t hurt me if it hits me, so why on earth would I even act afraid? If I’m about to have some of my deception revealed and be outed as an immortal, I might as well have fun taunting the person who’s going to out me.
“Hope you have fun dying, Lightning,” Danica says, her eyes locked on mine, as her fingers tense on the rifle’s trigger once more.
However, I don’t really want to be shot this time either, so, right before she can actually shoot me, I leap out of the way – and straight towards her – to tackle her and rip the gun out of her grasp. I then rise to my feet and hit Danica with the butt of the rifle, intending just to knock her unconscious long enough for me to get out of here, to have a gunshot that I definitely didn’t cause go off.
Squatting down next to her and looking her over with concern, I realize – my stomach twisting some as I do so – that I actually killed her by breaking her spine when I hit her.
“damn it, I didn’t mean to kill her,” I mutter under my breath, dropping the gun as if it’s covered in poison and turning away from Danica as the ground eats her body. I force myself to swallow – throwing up because of my own brutality wouldn’t help anything at all – and clench my hands into fists, wanting to punch something.
I have shouldered my supply packs, which came off when I flung myself at Danica, and am just about to leave the career camp for good, when I realize that there’s still the supply pile to be dealt with. It would probably be a lot easier just to make a snowball and trigger the trip wires and watch everything blow up, but I feel like destroying something the old-fashioned way: as in, with hurricanes and tornadoes and lots of lightning, and, with the blizzard still raging, I have the perfect cover for doing so. The cameras are bound to be so covered with snow by now that they probably didn’t pick up half of the fight between Danica and me, so I doubt they’ll be able to pick up something like increased wind or some lightning strikes.
Picking up the gun and throwing it onto the supply pile – I don’t want anything to do with that rifle, no matter how good of a weapon it is, since I just killed three people with it – I take a deep breath and let all of the pent-up anger and sadness I’ve been keeping locked inside of me for the last three weeks out into the atmosphere to feel the wind immediately pick up and have electricity dance off of my skin to illuminate the snow around me.
Above me, a funnel cloud inches down out of the clouds, and, with one sweeping hand movement, I direct the snowy tornado/hurricane – complete with enough electricity in the form of lightning to power all of New York city for at least a week – onto the supply pile and smile in satisfaction as I watch the remnants of the careers’ dominance get flung around and ripped up in the hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour wind. I guess it’s a good thing that I’m basically immune to wind and all of the storms I create – I also happen to have a built-in protective bubble around me that stops any of the debris that gets picked up by the storms I create from hitting me – because I’d be sucked up into the funnel cloud myself if I wasn’t.
The storms outside and inside me rage on for about ten more minutes, until I finally lose steam and the energy to keep a Category-Five hurricane up and fall to my knees in the snow, completely drained from my efforts.
“And there goes the last of the careers,” I murmur quietly as I watch the funnel cloud retreat back up into the sky and let all of the things swirling around inside of it fall to the ground – backpacks, packs of food, tents, clothes – all ripped to shreds, fried by lightning and basically completely destroyed.
I am just about to turn away and leave for good, not intending to ever come back in this general direction of the arena again, when something large, long and dark lands in the snow in front of me, and I bend down to see what the mystery object is. I quickly recoil when I realize that it’s the rifle I used earlier, with a slightly-more-scarred barrel from being hit by lightning so many times, as I don’t want anything to do with that gun because of all of the people I killed with it.
However, I also know that, if I don’t grab the gun, someone else – who will have no qualms about killing people with it – will undoubtedly find it and use it for just that purpose, so, sighing greatly as I do so, I pick the gun up and shoulder it, finding that it fits my body as well as if it had been made for me. Shivering slightly and shaking that disturbing thought out of my head – the most disturbing part is that Rush might have done that just to screw with me – I march away from the career camp, my hands tight on the barrel of the gun on my shoulder.

“Hey Marshall, look who made it back,” I have the energy to say, a small smile curling my lips at the shocked look on his face as he looks me over, before collapsing from exhaustion and falling into the snow.
I don’t know why people don’t sleep in this stuff more often, I think blearily, smiling as I note how the snow curls around my body to form an insulating layer of cold that cools me down and negates my natural heat-producing abilities.
“Lizzie, this is not a time to fall asleep in the snow,” Marshall’s voice, as distant as if he were a mile away, comes to me and invades my calm, half-asleep state of mind, and suddenly it occurs to me that his tone is worried, very worried.
But what is there to be worried about? I went on a quest to get... whatever the hell I was supposed to be getting and succeeded, too, so don’t I deserve a chance to fall asleep in the snow?
Slightly annoyed at Marshall’s interruption of my rest, I decide to pretend like I didn’t hear him and curl up in the snow more, noting peacefully how the white stuff pillows my body and makes everything cool, so cool. They really should make sheets out of this stuff. I would so buy some.
“Lizzie, it’s Luke.” That annoying voice won’t shut up, unfortunately, and is making it very hard for me to ignore it. Maybe it will shut up if I pretend like I’m listening... wait, Luke? Who’s Luke? Oh, right, Luke’s my husband, the one I went on a raid to get medicine for... wait, why does he need medicine? Oh, right, because he’s dying.
Wait, he’s dying!
I sit straight up, all mental sleepiness dispelled by the horrible thought of Luke dying. “Five more minutes, five more minutes to get him healed,” I mutter to myself as I get to my feet clumsily, “and then I can sleep in the snow.”
“Thank God,” I hear Marshall murmur to my left, but I pay him no attention. Every fiber of my being is focused on saving Luke, and everything else – including myself and the fact that I’m about to fall over from exhaustion – can wait till later.
Running towards the packs I dropped in the snow about twenty feet from the tent, I dig through them frantically to grab all fourteen vials of medicine out of them and then run into the tent itself.
“Lizzie?” Luke murmurs quietly when I come in, straining some to raise his head and look at me. I have to choke back a gasp of surpise and horror when I see him, because if he looked bad before I left, he looks terrible now. In fact, if he just laid there and didn’t move, I could very think he’s dead, he looks that bad. Of course, he will be dead soon if I don’t hurry.
“Lizzie, where am I?” Luke asks me as I bend over him and place a hand on his forehead to feel him burning up underneath me. He must be running at least a fever of a hundred and four, high enough to roast his mind, so I brush his question off as delirium caused by the fever and gently lay one of the snow-soaked cloths Marshall was using to try to cool Luke down on his forehead.
“Luke, it will be alright. It will be alright,” I whisper to him quietly as I carefully uncork the first vial of medicine and trickle it down his throat to have him, much to my relief, look instantly better. I then do the same thing with the other thirteen vials, his fever going down, natural color returning to his cheeks and his huge wound healing with each dose, so that, by the time all of the vials are empty, Luke’s wound has become a tiny surface scratch, he’s at a normal body temperature and he looks like he’s halfway through getting a good night’s sleep, not like he just almost died.
“Goodnight, Luke. I hope you sleep well,” I whisper to him quietly as I stare down at him, then bend down to give him a kiss on the forehead and collapse onto his chest afterwards, feeling the healthy warmth of his body wash over me.
Maybe I won’t lose him after all, is the last thing that crosses my mind before I am swept off into the world of dreams by the rising tide of exhaustion.

“You saved him Lizzie, you really did,” Marshall tells me quietly as we both watch Luke sleep, his chest rising and falling gently and evenly. He’s been asleep for the last twenty hours – ten of which I was sleeping on him – and hasn’t shown any signs of waking yet, so Marshall and I might be sitting there watching Luke for a while longer. Fortunately, he wasn’t woken up by Puck’s announcement of the dead – Danica, Terrell and the other career girl Katherine Sargent are among the dead, as well as
“I hope so,” I murmur in reply, my eyes locked on Luke’s face. I know that there’s still a chance for the infection to come back and for Luke to try to die on us again, but I really doubt that’s going to happen. That medicine really did do wonders for him; it’s a shame that I didn’t think to grab more, or administer it to Luke in small doses so that way might still have some left over, but oh well. All that matters is that I succeeded in my quest, and that Luke’s still alive.
“You saved him, Lizzie,” Marshall says again, his tone more insistent now. “Just take the credit as his savior and go with it.” I look over at him to see him staring at me almost in exasperation at my stubbornness, and I can’t help but smile as I nod my head.
“Ok, good,” Marshall says, my smile infecting his face as well, and he rises to his feet to cross the tent and stop at the exit. “I’m going to go get some food, be right back,” Marshall tells me, and I nod my head again, immediately turning to look back at Luke.
“Sleep well, Luke,” I tell him quietly, my eyes locked on his face, and, after a few moments of soaking in how tired I am, I rise to my feet, cross the tent and lay down next to him, resting my head on his shoulder and curling up against him.
“Let’s hope we both sleep well,” I whisper just before I fall asleep on his stomach.

I hear someone exiting the tent behind me and, knowing that it can only be one person, I quickly stand up, turn around, exclaim, “Luke!” and run at him to wrap my arms around him in a tight hug as my heart threatens to burst with joy. He’s alive, he’s not burning up with fever, he’s not covered in huge gashes, he’s not hungry or thirtsy – in other words, he’s about as safe and good as he’s going to get in this arena.
However, Luke doesn’t hug me back, and I pull back to find staring down at me in what appears to be confusion.
“Who are you?” he breathes, his eyes locked on my face with no look of recognition in them.
Suddenly it occurs to me why that medicine smelled familiar and why Luke had no idea where he was after I gave him that first vial: it must have been infused with a less-concentrated memory loss formula, the exact smae one I used to give to people who saw me kill when I was an assassin. Rage at the Triple Crown committee fills me, but is soon is replaced by a sense of hopelessness and unbearable sadness.
Even though the medicine was clearly diluted – I would have immediately recognized it from the smell if it was full-strength – it still might be strong enough to have completely destroyed all of Luke’s memories of me. If that’s the case, he will have forgotten the love he felt for me, and he’ll be able to see me for what I truly am: a brilliant, unpredictable, incredibly dangerous ex-assassin with a knack for manipulating people.
“Lizzie,” I force myself to whisper. My throat is bone-dry, and it feels like I can’t breathe.
“Lizzie... Lightning?” he says after a moment of staring at me, and I nod, a glimmer of hope sparking in my chest. However, it is quickly swallowed up by the complete and utter desolation dominating me, and I can’t bring myself to think that, even for a second, the Luke that loves me is still buried deep inside of him somewhere. It will just be even more excruciating if that Luke is gone completely.
“Why are you crying?” Luke’s puzzled and concerned voice draws me out of my thoughts, and I raise a hand to my cheeks to find that they are, in fact, covered with tears.
“Because you don’t remember me,” I whisper, and all of a sudden am struck with a pang of longing for my Luke, the Luke who would step forward and hold me and comfort me now, so intense that I feel compelled to wrap my arms around myself, lest the pain cut me open from the inside and I come undone.
I see movement in front of me and look up to have Luke wrap his arms around me awkwardly in a comforting gesture. Immediately I wrap my arms around him too and press against him, knowing that even this Luke who doesn’t know who I am can hold me together far better than I can hold myself together.
After a few long moments, Luke pulls back to raise a gentle hand to my cheek and wipe away my tears. He meets my gaze and murmurs, “What were you, to me?”
“I was the girl you had been in love with from the moment you first saw me in eighth grade,” I reply quietly, every world ripping my heart to shreds.
“I loved you?” he asks, and I nod my head in confirmation.
“You told me so ten times every day,” I add quietly, dropping my gaze to have Luke stare down at me for a few moments longer.
“I want to try something,” he finally murmurs, then cups my chin in his hand, tilts my face up towards his, and kisses me.

As soon as his lips touch mine, I wrap my arms tightly around him, then soon decide that isn’t good enough and have my hands work their way up to lock themselves in his hair. He reacts to this by pressing me to him more tightly, and, for a moment, it’s possible for me to forget that Luke doesn’t know who I am anymore.
However, that moment is broken up by Luke pulling back to stare down at me, his eyes and expression full of wonder.
“Do you remember anything now?” I ask him quietly, reaching a hand up to gently touch the side of his face.
“Bits and pieces. We did that – kissing – a lot, didn’t we?” he questions in return, and I nod my head in confirmation. I know that there’s a stupid smile plastered across my face, but I can’t help it; after all, the Luke I love – my Luke – might not be completely gone.
“But you didn’t mean most of them, did you?” Luke’s eyes lock on mine, and I find myself shaking my head no.
“Not in the beginning, no. But in the end, I couldn’t get enough of you.” I give him a smile, and now it’s his turn to raise a hand to the side of my face.
“I must have been a lucky guy, to be loved by someone like you,” he whispers quietly, his gaze glued on mine, and, even as my heart threatens to fall out of my body with guilt at the fact that I didn’t love him as much he loved me, I can’t help but smile. Yeah, my Luke definitely isn’t completely gone.
“I never loved you as much as you loved me though,” I reply quietly, and, much to my surprise, Luke shakes his head in denial.
“Oh really? With the way you just kissed me, I think it would be the other way around,” he tells me, and I force myself to swallow. Do I... do I really love him that much now?
“Luke, you loved me with every fiber of your being. I don’t even know if it’s possible for me to love you as much as you loved me.”
“Ok, so maybe there are a few rebellious fibers in your body,” Luke responds, and I can’t help but smile. “Still, it’s obvious that you love me a lot, and I maintain the fact that I’m very lucky for that, if I don’t remember most of it.” He gives me a genuine smile here, one that melts my heart like the old Luke’s smiles used to do, and my grin gets even bigger. Besides the memory loss, this Luke really isn’t any different than the old Luke.
“You’re such a nice guy Luke. What on earth did I ever do to deserve you?” I whisper quietly, burying my head in his shoulder as I realize that the Luke I love – my Luke –isn’t gone at all and that the memory-loss formula must have been diluted enough to only repress his memories, not completely destroy them.
“Well, you’ve kept us alive in here so far.” I pull back to see Luke gesturing at the arena around us, his eyes locking on mine after a moment. “That couldn’t have been an easy task.”
“Luke, it’s because of me that we’re in here to begin with!” I burst out, my anger and self-loathing finally getting the best of me. If I had just gone along with the Triple Crown, or never become a famous interdimensional assassin, or not been born an immortal, he and I wouldn’t be in this mess. Well, I guess I can’t control the last two, but the first one certainly was in my power to control. I don’t think I ever would have gone along with the Triple Crown, even if I could go back in time and do it all over again, but I still could have controlled it, or at least not dragged him into it like I have.
“What do you mean?” Luke asks me warily, his eyes clouded with suspicion and distrust now. Of course, now I choose to be all high and mighty and come clean; if I had been thinking, or restrained myself better, I wouldn’t have said anything like that at all, since it’s not exactly helpful towards getting Luke to trust me again.
“I’m an assassin, and it’s because of my skill that the Triple Crown committee threw us both in here,” I reply simply, and Luke stares down at me in wonder and fear.
“Oh,” he exclaims quietly, his eyes locked on my face with definite fright in them, and I feel like screaming and/or falling to my knees and crying. I don’t want to Luke to be afraid of me; I mean, I don’t want anyone to be afraid of me, but especially not Luke, and it looks like that’s exactly what’s happened. Well, I guess the Triple Crown committee has succeeded in driving us apart by clearing up Luke’s vision some, and for that I hate them. “Anything else I need to know?” he asks quietly, his eyes locked on mine, and, even though there are a million things he probably does need to know, he’s not ready to hear any of them – and even if he was, I wouldn’t say them on national television – so I shake my head no.
A few seconds go by in a long, awkward silence until Luke finally pipes up, curiosity taking over his expression, “Lizzie, how did I lose my memory of you in the first place? I remember some medicine, in little glass vials, that someone was giving me, but I don’t remember who gave it to me or what happened after that.” He stares down at me, questions brimming in his eyes, and, yet again, I feel like screaming and/or crying.
“Well,” I begin, taking a deep breath to steel myself and steady my voice, “I was the one who gave you the medicine, because you were dying, and there apparently was a memory-loss formula in the medicine. It must have been diluted, or I would have sniffed it out and you wouldn’t be able to remember anything at all about me.”
“Oh,” Luke says quietly, his expression full of wonder and still some fear that I hate to see. I really don’t want my husband fearing for his safety while he’s around me; after all, no healthy relationships come out of fear. After a few more moments of silence, Luke asks the inevitable question of, “How do you know so much about what must have been in the medicine?”
“Because I used that exact same memory-loss formula when I was an assassin, to erase the memories of people who saw me kill. However, I used a lot more concentrated version of it, which is why I didn’t recognize the formula in the medicine right away off of smell,” I explain, and Luke nods his head wordlessly, his mouth hanging open and threatening to hit the ground. He’s acting almost more reverent towards me now than he used to, which I don’t want at all, as reverence always comes with fear, and no good relationships have their roots in fear.
“So you were pretty dangerous when you were an assassin, huh?” Luke asks me, and I nod my head in confirmation, a small, bitter smile flitting across my face.
“Yeah, I guess you could say that,” I reply quietly, a wave of sadness and guilt washing over me. I wish Luke didn’t have to hear this, because I wish I hadn’t done any of it; I wish Luke wasn’t in here, because I hadn’t done any of that; and, above all, I wish Luke still had his memories of me, because I hadn’t so blatantly defied the Triple Crown and dragged Luke into it. It wasn’t fair of me, to rob him of his freedom and choice like that. After all, no sane person would choose to go through what’s happened to him because of me.
“I guess that means I don’t have to worry about dying in here then, huh, if I have you protecting me?” Luke says, making a feeble attempt at a joke as an equally feeble attempt at a smile flits across his face.
“Luke, you always have to worry about dying in here, no matter who you have protecting you,” I whisper in reply, and Luke’s face loses all of its falsely comical air. “After all, no one’s immortal, and no one’s immune to the Triple Crown. This place gets inside all of us, no matter how concrete we’d like to think we are,” I finish quietly, and look back up at Luke to meet his astounded and even more fearful gaze now. Well, at least he probably isn’t as afraid of me anymore, with me just telling him that there’s a high probability he could die in here.
“Do you think we’re going to die in here?” Luke stares me down, his blue eyes locked on mine, and I find myself answering honestly by nodding my head.
“Either you die in here or you come out dead on the inside. I’d much rather die in here,” I finish quietly, and Luke nods his head in understanding.
“You think it’s better, dying in here?” Luke questions, and I immediately nod my head. That isn’t even a question for me; if it was, I would have never voluntarily been the spark.
“I know it’s better, because you at least you die yourself, and get to control how you die. Besides, if you die in here, you don’t have to live long enough to see the world get screwed up and watch everything you cared about fall and everyone you loved die.” Maybe dying young isn’t such a bad thing after all, now that I’ve thought about it more. After all, if you die at seventeen, you don’t have to put up with sixty more years of the world falling apart. “In here, in the Triple Crown, there are no winners and losers. There are the dead and the broken, and, to be perfectly honest, I’d rather be the dead.” I meet his gaze seriously to find almost fear in his eyes, but I guess I can’t really blame him; I mean, I am talking about pretty scary stuff.
“You sound almost suicidal, Lizzie,” Luke says, clearly trying to make a joke out of it, but I can hear the worry in his voice and can’t help but be amazed by how much he still cares about me, even though he doesn’t even know me anymore.
“I guess I picked a good time to be suicidal then,” I reply quietly, to see surprise and more fearfulness – this time for my safety and probably mental health – take over his expression. He really is just innately good, and so easy to read; those are a few of the many things I’ve grown to love about him.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Luke agrees, but I can hear the uneasiness in his voice and see the worry and wariness in his eyes as he looks over at me carefully, as though expecting me to pull out a knife and try to cut my wrists right here and now. Fortunately, I’m not that suicidal. Yet. Give it a few more days in this hell on earth, with a Luke who doesn’t even know me and fears me, and I might be.
“You seem to hate yourself,” Luke murmurs quietly after a few moments go by in silence, and I look up at him in surprise. What brought a comment like that on, despite the fact that he is right?
“Well, I’ve done a lot of bad things my life,” I answer carefully, looking at him with my own sort of wariness. I don’t like it when he points out things like that, especially since he used to use things like that to unconsciously manipulate me and make me feel bad about myself, and, even though this isn’t that same Luke, I can’t help but be a little wary.
“Nothing you could have done could account for the amount that you hate yourself,” Luke responds, and, for the third time in this conversation, I feel like screaming and/or crying.
Even though this almost feels like how it used to be, it feels like the bad times we had, when Luke would subconsciously make me feel terrible about myself by trying to build me up when there’s nothing to build up, and it makes me wonder if his memory really is gone, or if the Triple Crown committee only took bits and pieces of it in an attempt to not only break me, but drive salt into the wounds as well. And that’s what I know Luke’s memory loss is now: the Triple Crown committee’s attempt to drive so much emotional shrapnel into my heart that I fall apart and cannot be put back together. When I originally realized that Luke lost his memory, that came very close to happening – I know I’m not out of the woods yet either, as I’m still dangerously close to breaking with every reminder of all the knowledge he’s lost – but I know that I can’t let that happen. It definitely wouldn’t be good for my position as the spark to be snuffed out by the Triple Crown committee. That would be counterproductive to what I’m trying to do, because that would only reinforce the message that the Triple Crown committee – and, in turn, El Nieve – is unbeatable, which is the exact opposite of what I want people in the Sections to think: that if they rise up and join forces, they can take down El Nieve easily.
“Luke, you don’t even know what I’ve done, so don’t try to make me feel better about myself when there’s nothing for me to feel better about,” I shoot back, to have Luke look truly hurt and disgruntled and immediately feel bad. I definitely shouldn’t have been so hard on him.
“Well, I do know there’s nothing you could have done that could be bad enough to make you hate yourself like you do, because you seem to hate yourself with a burning passion. Lizzie, that’s not good,” he murmurs, meeting my gaze and hesitantly laying a hand on my arm. “It’s not good for an amazing person like you to hate yourself like you do.”
“An amazing person? An amazing person?” I ask him incredulously, not believing what I’m hearing. Luke doesn’t even know me and he’s – falsely, I should add – still calling me an amazing person. Maybe he just is genuinely good.
“Yes, an amazing person,” Luke confirms, his eyes still locked on mine. “Lizzie, you love me, and loving someone’s a pretty big accomplishment, and a pretty amazing thing, so I don’t know how you don’t think you’re not an amazing person.” He stares down at me in concern, and I feel my heart rise up into my throat and stop me from breathing.
“Why are you so good?” I manage, after forcing myself to swallow three times, as I turn away from him so he can’t see my despair. I don’t need him coming up with some other great remark that only makes me hurt even worse.
“Why do you think you aren’t any good?” Luke questions back, and I shake my head as I stare off into the snow, a small, bitter and sad smile flitting across my face for a moment. Of course he chose to bring that back up; I guess Luke never gives up on any cause he thinks he can win. On this one, he just doesn’t realize that he lost it a long time ago.
Turning back to him and meeting his gaze almost fiercely, feeling empowered by a new wave of self-loathing and anger, I ask him, “Luke, do you have any idea how many people I’ve killed over the years, or even how many people I’ve killed in here?”
Luke swallows, looking incredibly uncomfortable because he doesn’t, in fact, know – he never knew those answers even when he did have his memories of me – and replies, “Well, no, but-”
“To be perfectly honest,” I continue, steamrolling over Luke’s words and not even giving him a chance to respond, “I don’t even know how many people I’ve killed over the years. I mean, I killed ninety-one as a government assassin, and probably at least that many who were other assassins hired by other people who were trying to take me out, but I couldn’t give you the actual number. It has to be something around two fifty, three hundred, I’m guessing.” I pause for a moment, which gives Luke time to open his mouth, and then immediately start talking again, “But I can give you the exact number of people that I’ve killed in here. I killed four in Hand-to-Hand, fourteen in One-Person Survival, and seven in here so far. Luke, that’s twenty-five people in three months. I’m a serial killer five times over.” My voice cracks with bitterness and anger and self-loathing at the end, and I have to take a deep breath and swallow before I’m able to continue. “Do you see now why I hate myself? Do you see now why I’m inherently dangerous when you’re inherently good?” I lock my eyes on Luke’s powerfully and stare him down, daring him to answer no.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to get that part of the dare, and answers, “No, I don’t.” When I stare at him in downright confusion for a moment – I mean, I did just tell him all the people I’ve killed, right? – he takes the opportunity to keep on speaking and continues, “Lizzie, you killed those people because you had to survive, and because you knew that either you died or they died, not because you actually wanted their blood. You can’t beat yourself up over surviving, Lizzie.”
“Oh yeah?” I shoot back. “I think I can, especially when I’m the only one that has survived. Well,” I amend, when I see the look Luke’s giving me, “except for you.”
“And you don’t see me beating myself up over surviving,” Luke immediately shoots back, and I can’t help but sigh. This would be so much easier if Luke would just me beat myself up over it.
“It’s because you haven’t killed nearly as many people as I have,” I reply, and Luke shakes his head vehemently. This is going to take a while.
“No, it’s because I know that the only thing that will come out of me beating myself up is self-hatred, and that’s just useless in here. After all, if you hate yourself, you’re automatically dead because you don’t want to survive,” Luke says, and, for once, I’m agreeing with him. I’m just not agreeing with the whole beating-myself-up thing.
“And that’s the point, Luke: I’m dead, whether you or anyone else likes it or not. From the moment I chose to become the spark, to fight for the Sections’ freedom, I signed my death warrant, because, if I don’t die in here like I’m planning on doing-” – I ignore Luke’s cry of protest and keep on talking – “-then I’m definitely dead when I get out, because the Triple Crown committee won’t keep me alive after I’ve dug myself in such a hole and proved nothing but trouble for them.”
“But Lizzie-” Luke begins, his tone defiant and pleading, but I immediately shake my head and cut him off.
“Luke, there aren’t any buts in here anymore,” I begin, meeting his gaze and staring him down, daring him with my eyes to interrupt. “I am definitely going to die, so I might as well embrace that fact, and go out in style. I might as well die on my own terms, and that happens to be in here, where I can be heard by everyone, not in an El Nieve execution chamber with a cloth bag over my head and a gag in my mouth. I won’t accomplish anything by dying that way-”
“And is this whole suicide mission of yours just meant to accomplish something that you could accomplish better by living to speak another day?” Luke shoots back, and I have opened my mouth and am about to retaliate when he continues talking. “Lizzie, you could do so much more, and change the world so much more, by living rather than dying. Hell, I don’t even know you, or know what you’re like or what you can do, but I know that.” Luke pauses for a moment, then finishes, his eyes locked on mine pleadingly, “Lizzie, it’s just common sense. If you live to tomorrow, you can change that many more lives tomorrow that you would never have met if you died today.”
“Luke,” I begin, feeling my chest about break open – this is so like Luke, my Luke, that it hurts for me to be around him when I know that Luke is buried and will take a long while to uncover, “this ‘suicide mission’ of mine isn’t just about changing people’s lives. It’s about giving people someone to rally around, a martyr who they can use as an example and paint on banners and write about in their speeches to stir everyone else up into rebellion. This mission of mine is more about feeding the fire of rebellion than changing lives.”
“And wouldn’t you feed the fire of rebellion more by surviving against all odds at the hands of El Nieve’s brutality? Wouldn’t that, your story of rebellion by not allowing El Nieve to kill you, be more inspiring than any suicide? I mean, then they’d have a live icon to rally around,” Luke says, and I shake my head and sigh. He just doesn’t get it, does he? But oh, right, he’s part of that majority of the population that actually has a sense of self-preservation and actually wants to live to see tomorrow.
“Luke, they don’t call them martyrs for nothing. Their deaths are always at the hands of the cruel governing party, and the events leading up to their deaths are always in defiance of the ruling party? I mean, would we remember Joan of Arc as clearly as we do today if she gotten away, and not died for her ideals? No, of course not. Luke,” I start, my gaze glued on his, “dying is part of the whole deal of being a martyr. If I don’t die, and give people someone to remember, then I haven’t done my job right.”
“So this is a job now for you?” Luke asks, his tone incredulous and ready to argue, and I nod my head, a small smile crossing my face, then start talking before he has a chance to say anything else.
“Damn right it is,” I shoot back. “And it’s the job that’s going to take my life.”
“Lizzie, you don’t owe the people of the Sections anything,” Luke tells me vehemently, his eyes locked powerfully and angrily on mine. It’s amazing how much he still cares about me when he doesn’t even know me. “You definitely don’t have to do a job for them that costs you your life. If they wanted to rebel bad enough, they’d do it without your help!”
“My God,” I begin, a small, sad smile flitting across my expression, “you have no idea how much you just sounded like Jackson.” Unfortunately, since Jackson is a bitter, rage-filled, hating person with almost as many scars as clear skin, that’s not such a good thing.
“Jackson?” Luke asks, his expression twisting up in confusion as he racks his mind for who on earth Jackson might be. As I am reading his mind, I realize as soon as he does when her remembers who Jackson is, and, in a less questioning and much more hostile tone, he repeats, “Jackson.”
“That’s funny,” I begin, not finding it funny at all but feeling obliged to say something before Luke says something else that might be even worse than just Jackson’s name. “You hate him even now, when you don’t even know what his relationship is with me.”
“You love him, and he loves you to an extent, but he’s hung up on another girl and you have me,” Luke immediately replies confidently, his eyes locked on mine, and I see something in them – a burning passion for me that I haven’t seen since Luke lost his memory. After a split-second of silence, in which time I realize how completely blown away I am by that correct answer of Luke’s and that momentary take-over of his body by the part of him that still knows who I am, he seems to come to and realize what he just said, and shakes his head vigorously, like a wet dog. He seems to be just as confused and shocked as I am now, as he looks up at me and asks, his eyes locking on mine again but with no remembrance and certainly no burning passion in them now, “Lizzie, what did I just say?”
“You just correctly told me what my relationship with Jackson is,” I answer, staring as deep and hard into his eyes as possible in an attempt to see if any of the emotion that was in them a few moments earlier is still in there. Unfortunately, all of it seems to have disappeared, and the Luke that doesn’t know who I am – in other words, the Luke that the Triple Crown manufactured in an attempt to break me –is the one in control of the body in front of me again.
“Lizzie, how is that possible?” Luke whispers, his tone just as stunned as I’m feeling. I probably should be happy – I mean, this means that my Luke isn’t completely gone, and that there may be ways to get him back quickly – but I’m too overcome with a desire for more of my Luke, for my Luke back completely, to be too happy about anything.
“All of your memories of me are still locked inside of your mind somewhere, and they happened to resurface for a moment to answer that question,” I hear myself saying, and I see, with a small smile, the amazement on Luke’s face. I guess he wasn’t counting on anything like this either.
“Oh,” he exclaims quietly, his expression full of wonder, and drops his gaze to stare at the ground in front of him and think. After a few moments of silence, he looks back up at me and asks, “Lizzie, does that mean that some part of me still loves you?”
I feel my heart free-fall out of my body, and it’s a couple long seconds before I finally come to my senses enough to reply. “Yeah, I think so,” I whisper quietly, still stunned by his question. Suddenly it occurs to me that him asking that just isn’t random, that there must be a reason behind him asking that, and I question, “Why do you ask?”
“Because some part of me wants you desperately right now.” I meet his gaze to see, sure enough, a fierce battle between passion and confusion in his eyes, and something about him – his apparent helplessness for the emotional turmoil roiling inside of him and the fact that he’s right, some part of him does really want me – makes me step forward and have him wrap his arms around me tightly.
As soon as he does so, he murmurs in my ear, “That’s better,” and seems to relax some – I guess that helped his emotions some – but doesn’t loosen his grip on me at all. In fact, if anything, he tightens his grip on me, so that I can barely breathe with my face pressed against his neck and the side of his face.
“Luke, suffocating me,” I manage to choke out, and he immediately releases me to jump back with an abashed look on his face.
“Sorry Lizzie,” he tells me, his tone and expression completely sincere. “Some part of me just wanted you as close as possible.”
“That’s alright Luke,” I murmur quietly as I gaze into his eyes, meaning every word that I say. I’d much rather have him accidentally suffocate me in an attempt to keep me close than not feel anything at all for me.
“Well, should we tell Marshall?” Luke gestures to the tent off to the side of the one he was in – we found a few other tents in the bags I grabbed but decided to only set one up, as having more than two set up would just be a pain to tear down and move with – in which Marshall is currently resting/reading his map.
“Yeah, probably,” I answer quietly, my eyes locked on Marshall’s tent.
I wonder how he’ll take Luke losing his memory of me. Some part of Marshall will probably be truly sad, as he knows how much Luke means to me, while another part of him will probably feel like jumping up and down for joy, because, with Luke out of the picture, he has a better shot at getting me. I don’t think he really ever gave up on the idea of getting me either, despite all of the things he said, because there’s something about the way he looks at me, and the way his voice changes when he talks to me, that is undeniable. Not only is he in love with me, he’s fighting for me as hard as Luke and Jackson are. Unfortunately for Marshall, he never would have or will have a chance.
“Lizzie, you alright?” Luke’s question draws me out of my thoughts and back into reality, and I shake my head like a dog after it’s gotten water in its ears in an attempt to clear all of those not-so-good possibilities out of my head. I really don’t want or need another boy fighting for me, when the two that are fighting are doing a hell of a job wrecking my heart as it is.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I reply quietly, not tearing my gaze away from Marshall’s tent. “Let’s go tell Marshall,” I say, and grab Luke’s hand to march him towards the tent.

[loyal]

[I was definitely not expecting the memory-loss thing. O.o You should keep writing this, 'cause I want to read the end! Just discovered this story yesterday. Pleasepleaseplease don't leave me hanging!

Oh, and I voted. I had two favorite characters. One was Abby, who died. I'm sad about that, but I didn't vote for her. But the other was Winston, which is why I chose the 'other' section. Just sayin'.]

[Sonmi-451]

Thank you very much for the comment W o l f e h; to be honest, I had basically forgotten about this thread until you commented. xD I actually already have the whole story written - I finished it in October - but I just haven't gotten around to posting all of it on here because I didn't think that anyone was actually reading it. However, now that I know I actually do have a reader, I'll post more.

“Oh my God,” Marshall exclaims, his hands balling into fists as he jumps to his feet, murder written across his face. “Those sneaky-”
“Marshall,” I call to him in a warning tone, leaping to my feet as well to lay a hand on his arm, which causes him to whip around and meet my gaze in surprise. Sure enough, he’s actually incredibly angry – no amount of acting could make up for the rage in his eyes – which makes me rather happy, because that means that the part of him – and there is undoubtedly that part in him somewhere – that’s happy Luke lost his memory isn’t the one in control of Marshall.
“Lizzie, they took Luke from you,” Marshall tells me, his eyes boring holes into mine, and I can’t help but wonder if he’s trying to read me as hard as I’m trying to read him. “We can’t just do nothing about that!”
“And running around blindly with no idea of what we can do about it won’t do any good either!” I shoot back to have Marshall bow his head in admittance.
“But-” he begins to protest, but I immediately cut him off.
“Marshall, no buts,” I tell him firmly, and he bows his head again. “I don’t want you killing yourself over something we really can’t control now. Besides,” I add, “that’s exactly what the Triple Crown committee wants us to do. They want us to get angry, and take our anger out on the other champions left.”
“This is personal though, Lizzie. This is personalized towards you,” Marshall says, his tone more than a bit suspicious, and now it’s my turn to bow my head in admittance. “This is their direct attack on you. Their whole goal out of this is to break you, isn’t it?” I can feel Marshall’s eyes boring holes into my face, and I look up to catch his eye.
“Yeah, it is,” I answer quietly. “I’m sorry that you got dragged into it,” I then murmur, and drop my gaze to the ground again. I’m sure the Triple Crown committee isn’t sorry at all that Marshall got dragged into it though, as they probably view him as a liability now, as, being a career who broke off from the pack just because he didn’t want to associate with the other careers, not because the pack shattered like it always does – I guess there won’t be a shattering in this Team Survival, seeing as I’ve completely killed the pack – he’s dangerous to them. After all, he’s in direct defiance of the train-all-your-life-to-win system that the Triple Crown committee has encouraged in the wealthier Sections it favors.
And I suppose they do have a reason for encouraging that system; after all, the Triple Crown would be really boring if it was just a bunch of skinny, scrawny, afraid little kids who don’t know how to use weapons and don’t want to kill each other. The careers at least make the Triple Crown exciting by guaranteeing that some people will die, and that’s the whole point of the Triple Crown: to kill off people for other people’s entertainment and horror.
“Well I’m not,” Marshall replies, causing me to look up at him in surprise and see him with an ear-to-ear beaming, determined grin stretching across his face. “This is my chance to get back against the Triple Crown committee and use love as an excuse.” He gives me a smile, his eyes twinkling, and I’m struck – yet again – by how much he really hates the Triple Crown committee and how much it really ruined his life.
If it weren’t for the Triple Crown – and therefore the Triple Crown committee – he would be back at home in Section Three, living a simple but relatively happy life working at the forges, and then maybe get a nice wife and have a few kids in five or ten years. He definitely wouldn’t be in here, this hell on earth, with a sword in his hand and a few kills to his name and a few more kills to make if he’s going to make it out of here alive, and he certainly wouldn’t have ever met me and have fallen in love with me and now be following me around while I take his heart and stomp on it over and over and over.
“Marshall, that kind of thinking will get you killed,” I tell him, noting almost blindly how blatantly hypocritical I’m being. After all, I didn’t just think things like that, I said them, am now living for them and am soon going to die for them. That doesn’t mean I want what I’ve brought upon myself for anyone else though. I especially don’t want it for Marshall, since he’d be doing it because of me if he were to do it at all.
“What does that matter? I’m dead anyways,” Marshall responds, shrugging and brushing my warning off to the side. I’m glaring at him and am about to chew him out for saying that – he really isn’t, after all, because he and Luke have a very good chance of winning after I take myself out – when he says, “Lizzie, don’t give me that look, because I know it’s true. I won’t want to live without you, so, when you die, I plan on going out too.”
“Marshall, I don’t want you to die because of me,” I tell him desperately, allowing all of the pleading I can muster to come into my voice. If I can make Marshall feel bad – and therefore make him think twice about dying with me – I can deter him from doing that. I mean, I didn’t ever intend for anyone to commit suicide with me, although it seems that there are now three boys who want to die with me. That’s really a shame, because the world could definitely use all three of those boys.
“Lizzie, there’s nothing you can do to stop me from dying with you now,” Marshall murmurs, his eyes locked on mine, and, much to my chagrin, he’s definitely serious. “I love you, and I won’t live without you, so the moment you die, a part of me that I won’t be complete without dies with you, and the rest of me will die soon after.” Marshall pauses for a moment, then finishes, his gaze glued on mine, “Lizzie, I am with you always, and I will follow you anywhere, even to death.” He takes my hand in his and gives it a gentle squeeze, and I turn away from him as I feel my heart creep up into my throat and threaten to burst.
This is the absolute opposite of what I wanted to happen; I don’t want any more people on my kill list, even if I don’t live to see them die, because I know that Marshall and Jackson and Luke will all be dying because of me if I die. I guess I really can’t win in this situation: either I die, and Marshall, Lule and Jackson die with me, or I live, and I kill other people in order to survive longer. I am a killer either way, and there’s no way for me to get out of it or avoid it.
“Marshall, why do you and Luke and Jackson have to be so damn devoted?” I mutter as I stare off into the snow, my hands involuntarily balling into fists. I don’t want to be basically worshiped – like Jackson and Luke and Marshall are basically doing now – I don’t want to kill any more people, inadvertently or otherwise, and I certainly don’t want to cause the deaths of three boys I’ve grown to love, if in very different ways. To be perfectly honest, it would be a lot easier – although it might be a lot more painful too – if Jackson and Luke and Marshall didn’t love me at all, and I was the one madly in love with them. That way I wouldn’t be responsible for their deaths when I die, because they might not even realize I exist in that scenario.
“Lizzie, you can’t control what Luke and Jackson and I do,” Marshall begins, and I whip around to look at him suspiciously. It’s almost like he’s been reading my thoughts, as everything he’s said so far has been almost a direct argument against my thoughts/opinions. “We all choose to die with you, and, since there’s nothing you can do about that and no way for you to change our minds, you should just accept it and let us do what we want. You can’t bleed for us, Lizzie, and we don’t want you to bleed for us,” he ends, his eyes locked on mine, and, after a few moments of a staredown, I finally look away.
They don’t want me to bleed for them, huh? Well, I’m going to bleed for them anyways, because bleeding for people is what I do. It seems to be my special skill, and, in the end, it’s the thing that will kill me. Isn’t that funny: the thing that defines me, that could be a great strength of mine, will, in the end, prove to be my fatal weakness. I guess wanting to bleed for everything is almost a good weakness to have, because the only things that will come out of my demise are good – well, except for the deaths of Jackson, Luke and Marshall, but them dying wasn’t really part of the plan.
“Lizzie, if you want to save us so bad, don’t die on us!” Marshall tells me emphatically, his eyes locking on mine. “You saving yourself is the only way to save us, so save yourself!”
“And if I save myself, then you and Luke have to die in the end,” I counter, to have my argument immediately answered by Marshall.
“And we would like that death, Lizzie,” Marshall finishes, his incredibly intense eyes boring holes in my own. “Dying to save you actually has a purpose, and is actually something that Luke and I were planning on doing if you survived that long. Dying to save you would be our ultimate accomplishment, our final goal. We would die happy, if we died to save you.”
“Marshall, don’t do this to me,” I groan, turning away from him again to glare out at the snow and trees. He and Luke and Jackson are so much alike in their behavior when it comes to me that I know Marshall’s speaking the truth: that if I die, all of them die with me.
“Don’t do this to us, Lizzie,” Marshall tells me emphatically, but I don’t turn around to look at him this time, mostly because I probably can’t bear to see the earnest and complete sincerity on Marshall’s face regarding the topic of dying for me.
“Marshall,” I finally begin after a few moments, as I think idly that why is it the only time Luke, Marshall and Jackson are actually a ‘we’ is when it comes to doing something stupid, like killing themselves over me, turning around to face him, “I don’t want anyone else dead, but I know that either I die or even more people die to keep me alive. That means, that if you and Jackson and Luke all want to be idiotic and choose to be collateral damage, then, by all means-” – I pause for a moment, finding the next words incredibly hard to say, considering that they go against everything I actually want them all to do – “die with me, because I have to think that more people will die if I survive than just you three if I die.”
“Now you’re finally talking sense, Lizzie,” Marshall says, a huge smile stretching across his face. “And I have to say, it’s kind of nice to have your permission to die now.” He gives me a smirk, which quickly fades when he realizes how sad the expression on my face is.
Marshall shouldn’t be happy about me allowing him to die; if anything, he should be disgruntled, or angry with me, or anything but happy, really, because he shouldn’t want to die, and he shouldn’t have had the bad luck to fall in love with me. None of the boys in my life should want to kill themselves over me, especially when they’re such better people than I am, but, of course, someone forgot to tell all of them that, and so now I’m going to have three more bodies on my hands, three more bodies of people I love. Watching Abby die was bad enough; I wonder if I truly will crack if one of them dies in front of me.
“Lizzie, what’s the matter?” Marshall asks me concernedly, laying a hand on my arm and gazing deep into my eyes in an attempt to read my emotions. Fortunately, I’ve spent so much time veiling my eyes that he’ll learn as much about what I’m feeling from gazing into them as he would from gazing at a blank piece of paper.
“You shouldn’t be happy about me giving you permission to die. You should be angry, disgruntled, annoyed, furious, loathing, anything but happy. Marshall, just because I’ve given you permission to die doesn’t mean that I actually want you to die.” I hear the desperation and pleading creep into my voice, but I don’t really care that I probably sound like a whiny, dramatic, typical high school girl right now. If Marshall realizes how much this is upsetting me, he might be persuaded to stop, especially if he really cares about my happiness as much as he says he does.
“Lizzie, I understand that,” Marshall begins gently, laying a hand on my arm in an attempt to comfort me, “but I don’t want to live without you either, and I know that’s what will happen if I don’t die with you, so dying with you seems to be the only way to follow you always, like I said I would,” Marshall ends, and I feel my heart sink some. Oh, great, there’s another one of those stupid ‘always’ promises, like Luke and Jackson have already made me. Unfortunately, all three of them seem to be very serious about keeping them.
“Marshall,” I begin, about to give him a very serious scolding for making me the promise of always when I really don’t want or need another boy’s heart for all eternity, when a rumbling sound up the mountain from us starts, and I pause in surprise to tilt my head and listen carefully.
My eyes shoot open in shock and worry when I realize what’s causing that sound, and I instinctively exclaim, “Oh, crap!” under my breath.
I then begin scurrying around the tent, trying to throw things together while peeking out of the tent flap and looking up at the mountainside constantly to make sure that it isn’t upon us yet – getting many weird looks from Luke, who’s standing outside the tent patiently – and Marshall asks me, his tone concerned like he’s fearing for my mental health as he steps outside of the tent with me, “Lizzie, what’s the matter?”
I look up at the mountainside to see what I had feared: a huge wall of snow rumbling down off of the cloud-capped top of the peak, and I reply, looking back over at him to see the shock and fear on his face now, “Avalanche.”

[loyal]

[Yay! I'll post after every one of yours, to make sure you know. c:
You so did that on purpose, by the way. Just 'avalanche"? Aargh!

I hate cliffhangers. :'c I don't like waiting.]

[Sonmi-451]

I actually can add more right now, if you'd like me to, although I'll warn you, I'm not sure you'll like the next section either. xD

[loyal]

[Put up however much you want to, just don't forget about me and leave forever or anything! c: ]

[xcopperx]

I love it you did such a good job

[Sonmi-451]

Thank you both for the comments! Just because you guys are actually the first people besides me that have actually seemed to care about this thread, here's more for you to read.

“Luke, we have to get out of here!” I tell him, grabbing him by the arm and tossing a backpack at him.
Unfortunately, Luke chose the worst possible time on earth to be frozen by fear, so I currently have a suicidal boy who might just jump into the avalanche if he thinks we – and I mean me – aren’t going to make it in Marshall and an paralyzed amnesiac in Luke. Man, I’d think I’d rather have any other two people on the planet for this situation, since my chance of surviving this avalanche has probably been drastically reduced by having Luke and Marshall as the people helping me get out of here, and, of course, it’s not like we had much of a chance of survival to begin with. In other words, we are completely screwed unless I come up with some ingenious plan.
“Run!” is the ingenious word that comes out of my mouth as I throw a pack at Marshall and take Luke’s hand to begin dragging him down the mountainside after me. After running for a few long seconds, I look over my shoulder to see the tent Marshall and I were just in get devoured by the hungry white wall of snow, and I pick up the pace some.
That will not be me, that will not be me, I tell myself. I will not die like this, at the hands of something so obviously made by the Triple Crown committee. After all, the last image that the people of the Sections seeing of me being me getting eaten by a white wall of snow – which is figuratively and literally El Nieve’s rage and revenge – wouldn’t exactly help give them the confidence to rise up and overthrow El Nieve, like I’m trying to get them to do. In fact, that would probably only scare them back into obedience of El Nieve, which is the worst possible thing in my mind.
“Lizzie, look!” Marshall yells to my left, pointing at something moving as fast as we are about three hundred yards behind us, and I peer closely to see that it’s not a something but a somebody, two somebodies, in fact: Adelaide and Marcus, booking it down the mountainside as quickly and desperately as Marshall and I are. As I look closely, I see the wall of snow roar behind them, gaining on them even as they run faster than I think is humanly possible, and, when it is about ten yards behind them, they seem to realize that they will never be able to outrun the avalanche and stop.
The last thing that they do before the snow devours them and two gunshots go off is kiss passionately, and I force myself to tear my eyes away from the spot where they once stood and look forward as I keep on running for my own life. Adelaide and Marcus made their choice to die together; now I have to give myself the possiblity to die with Luke later.
Suddenly I’m aware of movement to our right as well, and I turn my head to see Sarah and Nick – it’s amazing how many people were up on the mountain with us that we were completely oblivious to – running as fast as they can down the hill about two hundred yards behind us, a huge backpack that probably weighs as much as either one of them does on each of their backs. Their short legs can’t gain any ground on the wall of whiteness closing in on them, and, after a few moments, they seem to decide that they won’t be able to outrun the avalanche no matter what they do, and stop to kiss once before they too are swallowed up.
Gritting my teeth and balling my hands into fists, I force myself to not stop running and turn around and freeze the avalanche in its tracks by conjuring up a wall of air, as that would give me away as well as not bring Marcus or Adelaide or Nick or Sarah back. However, as soon as I tear my gaze away from the spot where Nick and Sarah chose to die, I see McKenzie and Sam do exactly the same thing about a hundred and fifty yards behind us and to our left: stop to face the avalanche and kiss one last time before they die.
What kills me the most is that I know my presence on the mountain is what caused this avalanche, and that Marcus and Adelaide and Nick and Sarah and McKenzie and Sam and all of the other champions that have been eaten up by the snow already would still be alive if it weren’t for me. Man, there really is no way for me to win, is there? Either I die, and take three of the greatest people I’ve ever had the honor of loving with me, or I live, and take out numerous other great people. It’s like asking me to choose between whether I want my family to die or my best friends: it will be incredibly painful and incredibly damaging either way.
As the rumbling gets louder and more immediate behind us – I swear to God I can hear Rush’s chuckle coming from the avalanche too as he watches us run for our lives – I know that the snow is gaining on us and that we will all be eaten up soon if don’t find something to take cover behind. Fortunately, the bottom of the mountain – and therefore the place the snow will lose steam, as well as a couple huge boulders that I don’t even think the avalanche behind us could move – is very close, probably less than an eighth of a mile away, so all we have to do is make it two hundred more meters. Two hundred more meters, and we’re golden, or at least we survive.
Unfortunately, two hundred meters after you’ve already run at least fifteen times that, with a huge wall of snow bent on having you for breakfast that’s steadily gaining on you, is a lot easier said than ran.
“Lizzie, we’re going to make it!” Marshall yells over the roar of the snow at me, and I look over at him momentarily to see his eyes blazing with passion and determination, and I know that he’s set and determined that I’m going to make it, even if he doesn’t.
We’re now about a hundred meters away from the boulders and the bottom of the mountain, and Marshall shouts, his eyes locked on our destination, “Almost there!”
However, the avalanche has also almost caught up to us too. Every few seconds, a glob of snow gets dislodged from the huge wave and hits me in the back, but I don’t dare turn around or let Luke or Marshall turn around, because the extra time it takes to do that will undoubtedly be the end of us.
Instead, I focus on our destination too, to find about five other champions who made it out of the avalanche ahead of us scrambling to climb the boulders, and then see five other champions coming towards the boulders – and the avalanche – like they’re running for their lives too. Upon closer inspection – I mean, no sane person runs towards something that could kill them unless there’s something equally as dangerous behind them – I see a swarm of blackness and, with my eyes shooting open in surprise, immediately realize what it is: Kuro in his form of pure darkness, helping to add to the chaos of El Nieve’s grand finale.
And I’m convinced that, if this was not meant to be a finale, it was at least meant as a way to make things a little more interesting, and maybe clear up the playing field some. Of course, Kuro, by making the other champions wild with fear and driving all of us together, has ensured that this is a grand finale, and that only one or two of us will come out of this alive. He’s probably hoping for only one, with his love for bloodshed.
Suddenly I realize that the boulders are right in front of me, and, shoving/boosting Luke up onto the nearest one and beginning to climb up myself, I turn around to make sure Marshall’s right behind us to see him about a yard away, with the snow only inches from devouring him.
As I realize what’s about to happen, I yell over the roar of the avalanche, “Marshall, I will not let you die!” and lean as far as I can off the top of the boulder to reach my hand towards him.
Marshall leaps and grabs my hand just as the snow grabs him and, for one moment, his beautiful eyes lock on mine surprisingly calmly and he gives me a small smile. He then murmurs, “Always,” and slips his hand out of mine to be sucked underneath the snow. The gunshot that marks his death is only a second behind, and I stay leaning over the side of the boulder for a few long moments, staring at the spot that Marshall Moore just occupied.
“I can’t... I can’t believe he’s...” I start, only to choke on my words and find it impossible to utter the last, inevitable one. I knew this was probably going to happen one day, with that day being sooner rather than later, but I didn’t think I would lose him so quickly or abruptly. Of course, I didn’t think I would lose Abby so quickly or abruptly either; I guess I’m just very skilled at getting people killed off.
I probably would have stayed there and stared at the snow in a state of stunned denial forever if it hadn’t been for Luke’s voice invading my thoughts. “Lizzie,” he murmurs quietly, laying a gentle hand on my arm, and I tear my gaze away from the snow with difficulty to turn and look at him bleakly.
“Lizzie, come here,” he bids me gently, but I shake my head no, a huge wave of rage at El Nieve for taking everything from me welling up inside of me.
Empowered by my anger, I leap to my feet, my hands balling into fists, to summon all of the pure, violent and stormy energy that I can, to lay waste to this desolate location that symbolizes El Nieve’s ruining of my life. Detection doesn’t matter anymore; El Nieve would undoubtedly find out in the end that I’m not just immortal, if they don’t already know that. The only that matters now is making El Nieve pay for what they’ve done, and, since I’m too far away to directly harm the city, absolutely destroying this symbol of their power will have to do.
Completely oblivious to everything else around me, I focus my mind – my thoughts are surprisingly clear; it’s as if my anger is making me think clearer and more coolly, even if the topic is completely destroying around me – on creating a huge storm above me and smile as the wind immediately picks up to whip at at least a hundred miles an hour around me. I’m vaguely aware of Luke looking over at me in awe and fear, but that doesn’t matter right now. All that matters right now is getting my vengeance on El Nieve, and avenging the deaths of Marshall and Abby and Adelaide and Marcus and Nick and Sarah and McKenzie and Sam and every other child who has died in the Triple Crowns over the last ninety-nine years.
Lightning crackles overhead, infusing the air with electricity, and I glance up momentarily to see, with vicious pleasure, a huge funnel cloud at least a half a mile wide forming above me. Willing the funnel cloud to come down and touch, I spot, out of the corner of my eye, Kuro standing off to the side of the boulders, completely untouched by the whipping wind and huge boulders and chunks of ice being thrown around by the storm, a smirk on his face. For one half-second, my sense returns to me, and I falter, wondering why on earth I’m doing this. The images of Marshall murmuring “always” as he’s sucked into the avalanche, and Abby dying in my arms after telling me that she hopes I get a legend after me some day, come into my mind, and I’m reminded of exactly why I’m doing this.
With another rage-fueled surge of energy, I send out a wave of at least a hundred lightning strikes so powerful that they’re bound to electrocute anything within ten feet of where they touch down. I think briefly that I probably just killed all the non-careers in the area, if they hadn’t been killed by the flying boulders already, but quickly push that thought out of my mind. Now is not a time for reason, or forgiveness, or getting soft. Now is a time for getting even, and the non-careers caught in this storm would have died later anyways; you could even argue that I’m doing them a service by killing them now and not making them suffer through any more hell on earth, like they would have if they survived.
After a few long moments, I lose the energy to keep the storm up any longer – this has to be the largest and most violent I’ve ever created, and it’s not easy to keep it up – and collapse to my knees on the boulder I’m standing on, the only one out of probably twenty that were lined up at the bottom of the mountain that’s still in its original position. It’s a few more moments of eerie silence, in which time I stare down at my hands numbly, before realization floods in and I begin to cry, which I hadn’t really let myself do up until now.
I cry for Marshall, and how his last word was ‘always’ to a girl he could never have an always with, and how I couldn’t save him from El Nieve, even after being given two chances; I cry for Abby, and how she knew what I was and still was naive enough to believe that I was the good guy, that I deserved a fairy-tale ending, and how I couldn’t save her either, even though I would have rather died than have her die; I cry for Marcus and Adelaide, and McKenzie and Sam, and Nick and Sarah, and everyone else that’s died in here, and how I couldn’t save any of them. But mostly, I cry for myself, because I know that I’ve failed my duty as the spark, that I’ve let El Nieve win, that I’ve lost everything that I once stood for, that I let that avalanche get to me and make me forget who I am and what I believe in, if only for less than a minute. I let down everyone from the Sections who was counting on me to stand tall and defiant and concrete and unbreakable by breaking, by finally truly snapping by letting El Nieve turn me against myself and get the best of me. Somewhere, between running down that hill and watching everyone I knew and liked from the Triple Crown die, and trying and failing to save Marshall, I lost part of myself to the avalanche, the most important part of me, too: the part that actually knew who I am and what I stand for, the part of me that actually was concrete, at least with my beliefs.
I would have kneeled there and cried forever if it was not for Luke, bless his soul. “Lizzie...” he begins, his tone shocked and fearful as he stares over at me from his seated spot on the boulder, and, shaking my head slightly, I turn to look at him and suddenly realize that he’s actually there, that I didn’t kill him too. I guess, with being in the eye of the storm with me, he was unaffected by the wind and lightning and flying objects.
“I’m sorry, Luke, that I didn’t tell you that I was an immortal,” I reply quietly, my voice sounding as dead as my heart and body and mind feel.
“It’s alright,” he responds, giving me a smile, but I know that it’s not alright, that it will never be alright until I actually give him a full explanation. However, I’m very happy to believe his lies, for once in my life, and nod my head, not really knowing what to do now.
“Lizzie, come here,” he tells me again, and this time I do exactly that, crawling over to him, curling up in his lap and sobbing into his shoulder. The thought that Luke wouldn’t be doing this if his memory hadn’t returned more crosses my mind momentarily, but everything except for for everyone I’ve lost – and how I wasn’t able to save any of them from El Nieve – is washed out of my mind by my tears.
I couldn’t tell you how long we just sat there, me mourning everyone and Luke mourning along with me. To be perfectly honest, I think he might have been mourning me more than anyone, as I know that he knows that I lost something inside of me to the avalanche too. It’s almost nice, despite everything that’s happened, to just lean back and feel his warm, hard body under mine and cry on him and have him wipe my tears away. It’s nice to have to have him back, and I know now that he is back, that his memory must have returned most of the way for him to be acting like he is.
After a while – it could have been minutes or hours or days, for all I was able to tell – I finally remove my head from his shoulder, wipe my eyes partially dry, and look up at him to find him smiling down at me with the same warmth and passion that he had before his memory was stolen. Yeah, he’s back, which is a very good thing, since I know I’ve ever needed him more than I need him now.
“Your memory’s come back, hasn’t it?” I ask him quietly, to have him nod his head in confirmation as his smile gets a little bit bigger. I guess he’s glad to be back too.
“Yeah. It came back, in bits and pieces, with every moment I spent around you. When I thought about the things I remembered – like the fact that your favorite color is blue, like my eyes – another things would come back – like the fact that your favorite number is thirteen.”
His smile gets even warmer, if that’s possible, and I feel compelled to add on, “And your favorite color is gold, like my eyes.”
“Yeah,” he confirms quietly, his eyes twinkling as he looks down at me and holds me against him. After a moment of just staring at each other, we decide simultaneously that we need each other, and I lean up to kiss him as he bends down to kiss me.
After a few moments of paradise, in which I recall exactly how good of a kisser Luke is, I pull back, give him the most sincere smile I’ve ever given anyone, and tell him quietly, “I’ve missed you.”
“And I’ve missed knowing you,” he murmurs in reply, and gives me one last short kiss before pulling back and just holding me against him, both of us reveling in the fact that we’re alive, that we know each other, that we haven’t been taken from each other yet.
We probably would have sat there soaking up each other’s warmth forever, if the Triple Crown committee didn’t bring it upon themselves to ruin our moment with one of their terribly-timed announcements.
“Champions, the Triple Crown has not been won yet,” a voice booms across the silent arena, and I realize, with a start, that it’s Rush speaking. I guess he decided that he wanted to remind us that one of us has to die personally.
“Well, I guess this is it,” I say as I turn back to Luke, my eyes locking on his to find the same peculiar calmness that I’m feeling. “This is really it.”
After a moment’s pause, I tell him, “I don’t want to stop, even if they order us to, this time.” And I’m being completely sincere: I don’t want to live with the wreckage around me, especially with the knowledge that I’ll just die in the end anyways, even if I do get a few more days or weeks with Luke. Even the extra time with Luke just isn’t worth it.
“Lizzie, there is another way,” Luke begins, and I shake my head emphatically, as I know exactly where he’s going with this: he’ll kill himself to save me.
“Not another way that I’m willing to take,” I immediately shoot back, and Luke sighs deeply. Obviously he knew I was going to reply with something like that, but still was hoping against it.
“Lizzie, I don’t want you to die with me when there’s a way for you to not die at all,” Luke tells me, and I can’t help but smile bitterly as I shake my head.
After a moment of staring off into the snow and trying to formulate a response, I finally turn back to him and say, “Luke, this is the only way we will both be happy. I love and I need you, Luke,” I begin, my eyes locked his, “so much so that I know that I literally would not be able to live without you. It would be like trying to live without oxygen, or food, or water; it just wouldn’t work. I know that there’s no way on earth that I love you as much as you love me, but Luke, I love you as much as I can, and how much I can love you is growing every day. You’re growing on me, Luke, and, like I said, you’ve already grown on me so much that I need you just to get through the day and survive. You are the person I wake up to in the morning, and the person I fall asleep on at night, and that’s exactly how I want it, Luke. I will not leave you, and I will not let you leave me either, and, since at least one of us has to go and neither one of us will leave the other one, both of us have to go.” I meet his gaze to see the shock and amazement plastered across his face, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s really that surprising that I love him as much as I do. I mean, I thought I made it pretty obvious, with going into the career camp in the middle of the night to get medicine for him and nearly losing it when he lost his memory.
Suddenly it occurs to me that Luke wasn’t nearly as opposed to this double-suicide in Hand-to-Hand or One-Person Survival, and I ask him, “Luke, why is dying together such an issue now, when you were fine with it in Hand-to-Hand and One-Person?”
“Because it’s so… immediate, so real now,” Luke replies, and, when I look at him curiously – it wasn’t real before when were about to skewer each other with swords or jump off a forty-foot-tall hand? – he elaborates. “Before, I always knew that the Triple Crown committee would stop us from actually committing a double-suicide, because they couldn’t afford to have their main event flushed and lose the possibility of having someone actually win the Triple Crown for the first time in seventy-five years. But now, with all the trouble we’ve been causing them, I think they might be almost happy to have us kill each other, because then they won’t have to deal with us anymore.” After a half-second’s pause, Luke adds, “It’s also permanent, if we kill each other now. We’re not coming back if we die here, like we would have if we died in Hand-to-Hand or One-Person.”
I nod my head in understanding, but I can’t help but sigh. I knew something like this was going to happen – Luke was going to insist on him dying instead of both of us dying, and I was going to vehemently oppose that – but I didn’t realize that Luke might actually have cold feet, after all that we’ve been through and all the other times we’ve tried to kill each other.
I take a few moments to put together a rebuttal, then reply, “Luke, this is the only way out. One of us has to die – that’s a given, and something we can’t avoid – and, since neither one of us is willing to live without the other one, we both have to die. And maybe it’s better that it’s permanent. I mean, do you really want to come back to all this?” I gesture around at the arena, and Luke lowers his head in admittance. “Besides, even if we were to come back, the Triple Crown committee would kill me off at the first chance they got. At least if we die this way they don’t get the satisfaction of killing off the spark themselves.”
Luke nods his head, and finally sighs and says, “Alright Lizzie. But how are we going to kill each other, considering that we only have one weapon between us?”
He gestures to my sword, resting about five feet away from us – it must have come off either during the climb up on top of the boulder– and I reach onto my back to find that there is, in fact, no bow or quiver on me. They must have fallen off during the climb up too, although they apparently fell into the avalanche, which means they could be anywhere in the huge piles of snow around us.
“Yeah, that kind of is a problem,” I agree quietly, and rise to my feet to look over the edge of the boulder and peer down at the snow for any signs of weapons I can go diving for.
However, it hasn’t been fifteen seconds before I hear someone leap to their feet behind me, and I whip around to find Luke standing about ten feet away with my blade in his hands and a desperate look in his eyes.
“I’m sorry Lizzie, this is the only way,” Luke tells me, his eyes locked on mine, and I run towards him as I realize what he’s about to do to to catch the blade in the palm of my left hand, mere inches from his face.
Immediately pain shoots through my fingers, and it takes all of my willpower not to cry out loud or start screaming and/or crying with the sheer physical hurt of it. Thankfully, Luke stops driving the blade towards him when he realizes that he’ll cut my hand open even more than he already has if he does so, but the damage has already been done. I can feel my fingers going completely numb, and I can’t help but wonder if I’m going to lose that half of my hand. If so, I guess it’s a good that it’s my left hand, because I’m right-handed.
“Lizzie, what are you… oh my God!” Luke exclaims, attempting to drop the blade, but I don’t give him a chance to. Instead, fueled by incredibly powerful self-loathing and the knowledge that Luke is so much of a better person than I am that there’s no comparison at all, I pull the blade back towards me with my left hand – I mean, I’m going to die anyways, so why does it matter if I really do lose the top of that hand? As I watch my self-inflicted death come close and closer, I idly think that it’s a good thing I’ve lost almost all feeling in my left hand, otherwise I’d be screaming in pain right now.
The blade is two inches, an inch and a half, an inch from my face – when, all of a sudden, it stops moving, and I look up for the source of the stoppage to find that Luke is gripping the blade with his right hand to stop me from killing myself. I hear him inhale sharply as the pain sets in, but he doesn’t remove his hand, and instead stares me down stubbornly, as if daring me to pull the blade closer to myself.
Of course I don’t, because I don’t want him to lose the top half of his hand either, and we simultaneously drop the bloody blade to have it clatter loudly on the boulder between our feet.
“Hey,” I begin, my voice sounding weak, frail and strained – probably because that’s how I’m feeling right now – “we have matching wounds.”
I hold my bleeding, numb left hand up – I can’t even flex my fingers, so they’re not exactly straight – to have Luke line his bleeding, probably numb right hand up against it, and, sure enough, our wounds match perfectly – a single, deep cut across the palm that threatens to separate the top of the hand from the bottom and probably has done irreperable damage to our hands and fingers.
“Now we can really say we’re a matching couple,” Luke replies, smiling weakly, and I laugh slightly, the insincere sound of it echoing around the deathly-silent and deathly-still arena. After a few moments, I lose the willpower to pretend that I’m happy, and quiet falls over us again for a few moments as we just stand there and stare at our hands numbly. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think either one of us really can comprehend what just happened, but we’re both content to pretend that we can, and neither one of us feels like pointing out this folly either.
“We still haven’t really solved anything though,” I finally feel compelled to say, and look up at Luke to find him watching me and nodding in agreement.
“Well, how can we solve this?” he asks, his gaze darting to the sword at our feet for a moment before returning back onto me. “I mean, we only have one sword, so there’s not really any way for us to die simulanteously. One of us would have to kill the other and then kill themselves,” he ends, and I can’t help but think, with more than a hint of self-loathing, that I would undoubtedly be the one killing us both if we did that.
As I look down at the blade and contemplate our options, my eyes tracing the metallic sheen of the blood-coated metal, a new possibility, one that would solve our problem completely, crosses my mind. “Wait…” I begin, and bend down to pick up the blade and heft it in my hand. “If we line up with our necks close together, we can position the blade so that it will cut both of our throats when driven upwards.” I hold the blade up against my own neck in demonstration, and Luke nods in agreement, understanding sparking in his eyes.
“That will definitely work,” he agrees, his gaze glued to the bloody blade. I suppose I can’t really blame him for not being able to take his eyes away; I mean, it is the weapon that’s about to kill him and is already partially covered in his blood.
After a few long moments of silence and Luke staring down at the blade almost in awe, he finally seems to come to his senses and looks up at me. “Well, I guess this is really is it,” he says, his eyes locking on mine, and I nod my head in agreement.
“If this were a sports game, it would be crunch time,” I add, and a weak smile darts across both of our faces.
However, neither one of us is truly happy, and we stop pretending to be so after a few feeble moments of terrible acting. We then just stand there for a few moments more, each one of us seeming to be waiting for the other one to move, until I say to Luke, “Luke, you have to come closer for this to work.”
He seems to come to at the sound of my voice, and shakes his head slightly and looks up to realize what I said and do just that, coming so close that our noses are almost touching as he looks down at me and I look up at him.
“I guess this is goodbye,” he murmurs quietly, and I nod my head wordlessly in agreement.
“I guess so,” I echo, my voice sounding so strained and desperate. I don’t really feel that strained and desperate, but maybe that’s just the shock of actually being about to die and nearly losing half of my hand earlier.
“You know that I will love you always, right?” Luke tells me, and I nod my head, a small smile flitting across my face. Always is the word that started and has consistently defined our relationship, so it seems fitting that it’s one of the last words he’ll say to me.
“And you know that I love you, right?” I ask him in return, and it’s his turn to nod his head, his smile actually out of genuine happiness as opposed to the amusement that caused mine.
“Yeah,” he says quietly, and then bends down over me to give me a passionate but gentle kiss.
Immediately I drop the blade, and reach my hands upward to have them lock in his hair, not caring that they’re bloody. He doesn’t seem to care either, as he merely tightens his grip on me and holds me against him even more desperately, like he’s afraid I’ll leave him when he lets go. In a way, I will, although hopefully we’ll be going to the same place when we die.
After a few long moments in paradise, perhaps the last moments I’ll ever spend there, we both pull back, and he gazes down at me for a little while longer before I finally come to my senses and realize that we’re supposed to be dying right now.
Taking a step back, I bend down to pick up the blade and heft it in my hand again, marvelling at how perfectly balanced it is. It’s almost like it was made for me, to be perfectly honest. As I think about the possibility that it was, I shudder involuntarily – I mean, I like a good blade just as much as the next fighter, but not one that was specifically made for me to help me kill more people – and Luke’s gaze becomes concerned.
However, after spending so much time around me, he has enough common sense not to ask what’s wrong, and just stares down at me expectantly until I raise the blade so that the edge is touching both of our throats.
Luke’s hand then closes over mine, his eyes locked on mine, and he murmurs, “Together.”
“Together,” I agree, and then we both simultaneously begin to drive the blade upwards. After about a half-second, the blade stops touching and starts cutting, and the unmistakable scent of blood – his and mine – fills the air.
We both ignore the pain, however, and continue to drive the blade upward, until I begin to feel a little light-headed from all the blood I’ve lost and Luke begins to look a little light-headed from all the blood he’s lost.
All of a sudden, just as the blade seems like it’s about to actually cut open our throats if it goes any higher, I hear a rumbling noise overhead, and we both look upwards to find a huge helicopter, like the one the Triple Crown committee used to airlift us out of One-Person Survival. However, it looks different than the one the Triple Crown committee used – it’s almost like a stripped-down version of that helicopter – and there wasn’t any official Triple Crown announcement telling us that we had won, which makes me think that this helicopter might not have been sent by the Triple Crown committee. But who sent it then?
Instinctively I lower the blade from our throats, feeling my skin healing up as I do so, to have Luke remove his hand from the hilt and stare up at the helicopter as well. However, his eyes fall on my neck before he has a chance to, and, with an amazed look on his face, he reaches a hand out to gently touch the newly scabbed-over skin of my neck.
“Lizzie, you heal so quickly!” he murmurs in amazement, and then looks up at me to meet my gaze curiously.
“Part of being immortal,” I reply quickly, and immediately tear my eyes away to look back up at the helicopter. I don’t like the look of this, I don’t like the look of this at all, because I have no idea who sent that helicopter in.
“Oh,” Luke exclaims quietly in shock, and we both move out of the way to give the helicopter room to land, with it settling down precariously on the boulder a second later.
The passenger door, with tinted windows so dark that they’re almost black, begins to open, and I lift the sword instinctively. If whoever is coming out of that helicopter intends to hurt us, they’re going to have a hell of a fight awaiting them.
A huge foot, soon followed by the beefy leg it supports, comes out of the opening door, and a very familiar voice says, “Oh, do put that sword down Lightning. Everyone knows you’re going to do a lot more damage with the clouds than you will with that thing.”
As the person exiting the helicopter comes into full view – and nearly blocks out the sun while they’re at it – my jaw literally falls open in surprise.
Max.

[loyal]

[Oh thank freaking goodness! I'm happy they lived... but sad they couldn't save everybody.]