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Treech never did make it to the morgue.
He tried to crawl towards Lamina, Tanner, Marcus, Bobbin. On ghostly hands and knees, he hustled his way towards the center of the arena, squinting helplessly through cloudy eyes.
Ignoring the pearlescent tone of his skin, tearing his gaze away from the hazy blood on his hands, he moved sluggishly as though he were in a thick vat of syrup.
The world seemed to be melting around him but the air was anything but humid. It was bone chilling, tearing at his gossamer clothes and tousling his wispy curls.
Lamina was the only thing he could focus on, the one thing he was fighting to keep in his line of sight amidst the whirling elements. But why did she look so strange? Her hair was astray, her limbs startlingly limp, her eyes open and glassy.
Something was very obviously wrong with the scene in front of him. Was the world caving in? Was Lamina sleeping?
As his surroundings swirled around Treech, he managed to make out four other figures in the distance, translucent snakes dangling off of their arms.
His vision was darkening, was that from the mysterious substance that had sent him falling to the ground in the first place? The matter from the vents that had sent him staggering to his knees as Coral hunted Lucy Gray?
The last thing he saw before the elements finally took over was Lamina’s still form, splayed out under the beam.
And the last thing he felt was complete and utter longing for her.
He woke to the sound of harmonized wailing.
He winced slightly, the mournful sound buzzing around in his ears as he twitched back into consciousness. What had happened? Had he fallen asleep? He was facedown on the ground, perhaps he had lulled off for a brief moment.
He blinked heavily, waiting desperately for his eyes to readjust. He rubbed instinctively in an attempt to clear them, but something continued to sting at the corners of his eyes. His nose, too. It was like his entire face was on fire.
Squinting, he pushed himself up off the ground and into a hunched, seated position. When his eyes finally focused as much as they were going to, he saw a group of unfamiliar kids trembling in a wide circle, a pile of weapons at its center.
He was, without a doubt, mere moments away from witnessing a fight for survival. A fight that he himself had shouldered through with a foolish plan and selfish intentions. His name was Treech, he’d been Reaped at age sixteen, he had been a tribute in the Tenth Annual Hunger Games.
He didn’t need to count the heads of the nameless teenagers in front of him to know that there were twenty four of them.
Oh no.
No, no, no. Not again.
He instinctively scooted backwards, a pathetic whimper catching in his tight throat. Despite the pebbles and debris catching under his hands, he didn’t feel their sharp edges. He couldn’t feel anything, really, except for the inexplicable stinging sensation across his face. And the sinking feeling in his stomach that he was about to witness murder committed by teenagers all over again.
Why was he suddenly a spectator of an unknown Games, complete with fresh, terrified tributes?
“What’s going on?” He mumbled to no one, his surroundings slowly beginning to make startling sense.
Looking around, he finally located the source of the crying noise. It was coming from the pale figures of Mizzen and Coral hovering on the outskirts of the ring of tributes. Were those iridescent, ribbon-looking strips hanging off of their arms snakes? Seemingly unbothered by the creatures draped over their limbs, the pair from Four stumbled towards a girl with mournful eyes and wild brassy curls.
“It’s happening again,” a voice suddenly whispered from above Treech. Startled, he looked up to see Wovey, snakes twisted around her arms and legs. She stared straight ahead, her soft features blurred slightly by some unknown, glowing light.
“Why are we here?” Another voice, this one low and rumbling, spoke up to his left. With one glance, Treech recognized the newcomer as Reaper. The boy from Eleven’s nostrils flared dangerously as he tugged at a translucent rainbow snake slung around his neck.
Wovey and Reaper had been in the arena with Treech, as had Mizzen and Coral. They had allied, competed, fought, and betrayed one another all for the chance of life. And by the looks of it, the twenty four newcomers standing in front of them were about to go on the very same journey.
“It’s the Hunger Games,” Treech managed to choke out, practically unable to believe his own words. “Only I don’t think we’re the tributes this time.”
“It’s happening again,” Wovey repeated, pursing her lips as her pearly brow furrowed.
Reaper’s frown darkened and he cast a wary glance over Treech’s head at the girl behind him. “Wovey, I saw you die. The snakes-“
“What do you mean?” Treech pressed, baffled at Reaper’s perplexing comment. Wovey hadn’t been among the dead last he’d checked, she’d been hiding out in the tunnels beneath the arena. A wise tactic for someone going at the Games alone. Lamina had taken a similar approach, only she had sheltered herself high in the sky-
Lamina.
He flinched in horror, shocked he hadn't realized the glaring absence sooner as his vision went red. “Lamina-where is she?” He looked around wildly, searching for the familiar sight of his district partner. Her gentle face, her quivering mouth, her damp eyes, he was delirious for any sign of her.
“She’s not here,” Reaper said hesitantly, a warning bite to his voice. “Treech-”
Somewhere off in the distance, an echoing voice began to count down. “ ...ten…nine…eight…”
“Where is she?” He repeated the question, scrambling to his feet as he ignored the ominous countdown. Where was Lamina? Where were Tanner, Bobbin, Marcus, Dill, Panlo, Hy? Where were they? Where was Lamina?
Reaper moved in front of him, frowning down at Treech with suspicious eyes. “Didn’t you see? Back in the arena? We were the only ones who-“
“ ...four…three…”
“She has to be here.” Treech was falling quickly into hysteria, darting around Reaper to scan the surrounding area for a flash of auburn hair. “If you two are here, she must be nearby.”
“We were the only ones,” Wovey echoed Reaper’s words quietly as Treech skirted around her, nearly knocking her over in his frantic search.
“Treech-” Reaper began, only to be drowned out by the blaring, familiar buzzer sound. On cue, the twenty four nameless teenagers charged in every which way with a synchronized cry.
Treech took off running too, but in the opposite direction of the violence. Ignoring shouts from Wovey and Reaper, he dove into an unknown forest.
He tore through the trees, calling out wildly for the girl he had betrayed. The girl who had been far too good for him and had probably realized that, for she must be hiding from him in that moment. Where else would she be?
He ran his voice ragged as he stumbled through the unfamiliar terrain. Lamina was from District Seven, just like him. Maybe she was avoiding him up in the trees, hidden in the sickly green foliage above.
And so he began to climb, numb to all feelings except for desperation as he dug his fingers into the trunk’s bark. Lamina was good at climbing, she had climbed up that beam in the arena, after all. The beam where Coral had-
He halted midway up the tree trunk, stunned by his own hazy memory. Lamina was dead, he’d watched her drop off the beam. The impact of her fall had sent a thin cloud of dust flying up into the air. He had crept towards her still body, unwilling to believe that she was gone. One real look at her, however, and he knew it to be true by the lack of warmth swimming in her eyes.
Lamina was dead.
That realization sent him into such a frenzied horror that he lost his grip on the trunk. He didn’t even try to reach for it as he fell backwards and tumbled to the forest floor below.
In any other situation, the fall would have snapped Treech’s neck, sending his head flying at a deadly angle. But this wasn’t like other situations, and something was undeniably wrong. His neck didn’t pop when he hit the ground, he couldn’t even feel the impact of the tumble. He was completely all right and yet there was something glaringly distorted about his lack of feeling. He was alive and yet maybe he wasn’t.
He stared up at the sky overhead, which was tinting dark to indicate that the sun would soon be setting. He must have spent hours searching for Lamina just to realize that she really was gone, just as Reaper had said.
He had witnessed her die in the arena, her demise a direct product of his own fleeting loyalty and selfish motivations. The look of betrayal she’d sent him as Coral jabbed at her with a trident burned cruelly in the pits of his stomach like a dirty sin.
Treech loved Lamina. And yet he’d left her for the dogs.
He stayed like that, limp and horror-struck, until the sun disappeared behind an unfamiliar horizon and night was upon him like a cold blanket.
Choking back frustrated sobs, Treech finally dragged himself to his feet. Without an end destination in mind, he moved where his instincts decided to take him.
Following that inkling, he found himself back at the weapon pile he had first woken up in front of. Perched on top of a large, flat stone were four luminous figures. They appeared to glow in the moonlight, hazy, cold halos around each of them.
Silently, he hoisted himself up onto the tabletop. He sat down beside Wovey who greeted him with a pat on the knee that he could not feel.
“We’re dead,” Reaper said quietly, an answer to a question that no one had outwardly voiced. And yet they were all silently asking it. There was no shock in his voice, only defeated indifference.
Treech let that realization finally sink in. In his frenzied quest of finding Lamina, he’d barely had time to ponder his own situation.
Reaper’s suggestion wasn’t a theory at all, but rather a glaring truth. It explained why Treech’s pulse wasn’t racing when he searched for Lamina, why his heart wasn’t pounding even though it ached out of heartbreak, why there was a ghostly hue radiating off his companions’ skin.
It felt strangely familiar, being dead. Treech had always believed himself to be one step away from death’s door in the world of the living. He was hollow in Seven, twiddling his thumbs as he waited patiently for death to whisk him away just as it had done to his father.
He fought against those morbid thoughts when he was shoved into the Games out of respect for his family. His mother and his brother Aase wanted him to return back to Seven. Duty called and he pledged to heed their call. As he always did.
Besides, Lamina had made it easy to want to choose life. She hadn’t made him feel hollow, she filled him with purpose and something more intense.
“Are we ghosts?” He finally asked, piecing together the reality of his current being.
“Something like that.” Reaper stared straight ahead at the treeline in front of them.
“I always thought ghosts could travel through solid objects,” Mizzen piped up, hat askew on his head as he fiddled with his thumbs.
“Mizzen tried walking through a tree.” Wovey turned to inform Treech with a shake of her head. “Didn’t work.”
Treech fidgeted slightly, feeling awkward and out of place sitting alongside the four other tributes. Sure, he had been allied with Coral and Mizzen, but they had collectively tried hunting Wovey for their own personal gain. Before Treech had — well, died — Coral had promised that Reaper would be their next target once “the songbird” was finished.
And then it would have been Treech that the pair from Four turned on. Just as they had done to his district partner.
“Does that mean Lucy Gray won?” He wondered aloud, his fingers twitching to rub out the pain in his eyes. “Since she’s not here with us now?”
“Coral was the last person to die,” Mizzen mumbled, his eyes darting towards his district partner who sat furthest away from them all. “She said Lucy Gray was the last thing she saw before-” he gulped and dropped his head, unable to even finish his unthinkable sentence.
“What happened to you all?” Treech muttered, eyeing the snakes hesitantly. They were beautiful for reptiles, brightly colored like the candies his family could not afford back in Seven. But they also looked synthetically deadly, a product of something that was not natural.
“They released a tank of snakes on us,” Reaper answered, his lip curling with muted anger. “Killed us off instantly.”
“So many snakes,” Wovey whispered, gazing down at the hissing creatures gathered around her feet.
“It happened right after you died,” Mizzen supplied, nodding his head in Treech’s direction. “I saw your body when I got down from the vents. What happened to you?”
Treech’s pale hand instinctively drifted to his face, the fizzy pain still buzzing in his nose and tear ducts. “I think I was poisoned,” he said finally, thinking about the white powder that had rained down from the ceiling onto him. Why there was poison in the ceilings, he did not know. But there were many things that didn't make sense at the moment.
The sound of rustling leaves sent them all straightening up to attention. A girl stumbled through the brush, her dark skin ashy as blood oozed into her thick hair. She scurried up to the pile of weapons, her eyes never once skirting over the ghost tributes. She clawed through the rubble until she finally produced a small knife. Laughing in relief, she clutched it in her hands and sprinted back into the darkness.
“They can’t see us,” Mizzen commented once the girl was out of sight, his thin jaw clenched.“The tributes. Mags wouldn’t look up when I called out to her. She didn’t react when I touched her, either.”
“Mags?” Wovey asked tentatively.
“Someone from home,” Mizzen muttered, his gaze sliding in the direction of a silent Coral.
Treech was familiar enough with Coral's tempermental nature to know that he should not press about the girl she had known back in him home district. And so he fell silent, as did Reaper and Wovey. The wind whistled through the trees, its sound mimicking a bird of sorts.
“Why us?” Treech said finally, unable to keep quiet while so many queries still bounced around his brain. “Where is everybody else? Where's-” He had to stop himself from saying Lamina’s name.
“You mean, where is your girlfriend?” Coral spoke up for the first time, drawing all eyes to her. She scowled at them when they met her gaze.
“Lamina was your girlfriend?” Wovey gasped quietly, blinking up at Treech with dewy eyes.
“No,” Treech muttered sourly, frustrated phantom tears swimming in his eyes. He hadn’t deserved someone like her, someone so inherently good. Only in his dreams would he have been able to dub her such a thing.
“Then stop moping,” Coral turned away with a cold huff, attempting to flick a snake off of her thigh. It hissed at her angrily.
A dull anger filled Treech's chest as he witnessed her indifference. “Moping? She’s gone and you were the one that killed her,” he hissed as he glared at Lamina’s cruel murderer.
Coral lifted her chin defiantly and shrugged. “I did what everyone else did, I killed to survive.”
“But she was-“ If ghosts could blush, Treech would have been deep red.
“She was what?” Coral’s pale eyes found his, a fire burning in them despite their hazy nature. “Your girlfriend?”
“Why do you care?” He finally spat, unable to say anything more as a thousand emotions rushed through his paranormal body. The most prominent one being rage, which made him yearn to wring Coral's neck had she not already been dead.
“Because mine is sitting right there.” Coral flung a pointed finger in the direction of a tree off to the right. Treech squinted and managed to make out the figure of the sleeping girl tribute from Four, the one that Coral and Mizzen had been crying over hours before.
“I see,” Treech muttered tautly as silence once again fell over them. It felt bizarre to him, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and talking with the people he had been previously competing to outlive. Why were the five of them trapped in a new year of the Hunger Games? Where were the rest of their dead companions?
“Reaper’s bodies,” Wovey finally lisped as if hearing Treech’s mental question.
“What do you mean, Wovey?” Mizzen frowned quietly, pursing his lips.
“You gathered all the bodies of tributes under the flag,” Treech said, catching onto Wovey’s train of thought as he turned to address Reaper.
“It looked like a morgue to me,” Mizzen muttered, eyeing Reaper warily. Treech had thought the same thing when Reaper first picked up Dill and set her down in between Lamina and Panlo. The boy from Eleven had looked utterly grim as he gathered up the casualties in a tidy line.
“I was just trying to keep the victims safe,” Reaper mumbled somewhat sheepishly. “I didn’t want Dill to be alone in deat-” his words were cut off by a raw choking sound rumbling in his throat.
“It was kind.” Wovey laid a hand on his shoulder and Reaper looked ready to burst into tears.
“We didn’t make it to the morgue,” Coral muttered, her pained eyes darting back and forth across her companions’ faces.
And just like that, it all made sense. Why the five of them were drifting around as ghosts, trapped in yet another year of the Hunger Games.
The Eleventh Hunger Games were over in a long, drawn-out week. Compared to the Tenth Games, which flew by for Treech in a bloody nanosecond, the Eleventh teased them with its duration.
He credited its sluggish timeline to the number of tributes but also in part to the arena itself. The Eleventh Games had all twenty four of its tributes unlike his own Games where only nineteen had made it into the arena.
The arena was the real game-changer, however. Whereas Treech and his companions only had tunnels and bleachers to stow away in, there was no shortage of hiding places for the new tributes in the woods. They had acres and acres to navigate, enclosed by a tall electric fence that crackled with deadly energy.
Treech watched Coral watch Mags like a hawk. She tailed her girlfriend the entire duration of her stay in the arena and watched over her diligently while she slept. He heard her speak to Mags, whispering sweet nothings in her ear that he was respectful enough to tune out. It was easy for him to pick up Coral’s warning cries in the arena’s forest every time a tribute got too close to Mags. Although the girl could not hear his ghostly companion’s warnings, perhaps she could on a deeper level, for she always managed to evade death one way or another.
Surprising relief surged through Treech when Mags finally outlived a dehydrated boy from One, thus ending the Eleventh Hunger Games. Coral stood by her side, longing and gratitude etched clear on her face over the fact that her lover would continue to walk among the living. She stayed there, hovering over the other girl’s shoulder until the Peacekeepers forced their way into the arena and roughhoused Mags out of the enclosure.
Mizzen wouldn’t let Coral go after that. With his spindly arms, he clutched on tight to his friend as the guards led the curly-haired girl away. Reaper, Treech, and Wovey hung back at the edge of the forest, watching the deadliest force of the Tenth Hunger Games break down in the arms of her thirteen-year-old district partner and cry like a young child.
A thick breeze picked up, rustling the leaves in a sinister way. It intensified almost immediately, the wind sweeping around Treech like a targeted storm. It tugged at his hat and tore at his scarf, as if notifying him that it was time to go.
“Wovey,” Treech called out urgently, squinting as he attempted to make out his comrades. The same misty tempest that had whisked him away in their own arena was suddenly back, muddling their surroundings and creating a deafening echo chamber. The force that had put them there in the first place was suddenly calling them back to the darkness.
He could hear Wovey crying back to him, but she sounded miles away. He fought against the swirling mist, hissing in fear as the world faded around him. “Reaper! Mizzen! Coral!”
Their voices were lost in the hubbub, as were their bodies. Tossing his head up towards the sky, he called out the name that would forever be resting on the tip of his tongue. “Lamina!”
He swore he saw her, in the mess of it all, her eyes wide and her hand reaching out to him. He watched her mouth his name, her fingertips nearly brushing his own as he reached a desperate hand out to her.
And then darkness.
When he awoke next, it was the Twelfth Games.
There were 24 new kids. And the same five dead ones, trapped in a brutal, unforgiving purgatory.
Waking up to new tributes and falling back into unconsciousness when the victor left the arena became a never-ending cycle Treech quickly began to loathe.
By the time the Twelfth and Thirteenth Games were over, he and his companions were clear on the terms of their situation: they woke with the arrival of the batch of tributes to the arena and faded into the ether when a victor was crowned. The tributes could not see the ghosts, nor could they hear them. The ghosts could move freely around the arena but just like the tributes, they were trapped there with no hope of escape.
The first several years of navigating their own personal purgatory, Treech and his companions were on edge. After Mags’ unexpected appearance in the Eleventh Games, they stayed on high alert. Nervous and anxious, they scanned each new round of tributes for signs of family members, classmates, friends, neighbors, playmates.
He didn’t relax, not even slightly, until the Nineteenth Hunger Games were over. Not until his brother was nineteen and no longer eligible for the Reaping, safe from the violence Treech had endured. He still saw kids that reminded him of his brother, but none of them were Aase. His brother achieved what he himself could not.
Wovey did mournfully point out during the Seventeenth Games that the tribute from Eight bore the name of Bobbin’s brother, Woof.
She, Coral, Mizzen, Reaper, and Treech followed Woof around everywhere he went, desperate for a different version of Bobbin to make it out of the arena. Though they could play no part in altering his fate, their silent good wishes must have made some sort of difference in keeping him breathing. When Woof was crowned the victor and marched out of the arena by Peacekeepers, the ghosts cheered. Not out of support for the Games but rather due to the relief that a piece of Bobbin would live on in Panem’s history.
They grew closer, too, the five ghosts of the Tenth Games. Reaper let his guard down, Coral dropped her hostility, Wovey and Mizzen learned to trust the older kids. Treech himself fought off his usual despondency, eternally grateful he was not trapped in the brutal cycle alone. Every time they awoke in a new arena with a new set of victims, they gravitated toward one another like old friends.
When they weren’t watching tributes compete to outlive one another, the ghosts stuck together. Treech would join Mizzen in the boy’s search for each new arena’s water source. He followed freshwater springs and waded around tidal pools with the boy from Four, allowing Mizzen to ramble on about the magnificence of each ecosystem’s flora and fauna. He would turn Mizzen’s shoulder away every time a tribute died on their crawl towards the water, shielding the boy from any more deathly sights than he had to endure.
With Wovey, who was a self-described good climber, Treech would scale the different trees as he raced her to top. He had viewed many a tree in Seven, but each new arena managed to come up with ones he had never seen before. The two of them would perch up on the branches, counting leaves and inspecting the bugs that crawled past them. Up in the air, they were spared from watching the violence below. Hidden in the trees, they caught a break from the death and decay.
Reaper and Treech were drawn together by their shared skepticism of the world. To the untrained eye, they were jaded and pessimistic when in reality, their sour attitudes reflected the harsh nature of their mirrored upbringings. They lamented to one another about everything they would change about the world, both experiencing a startling form of idealism not seen before in either boy.
Coral was a tough nut to crack, one that Treech didn’t necessarily want to break open at first. He’d believed he already knew enough about Coral, her brutality, and her cruelty, from their short alliance together. Until he saw the tender way she interacted with not only Mizzen, but also Wovey. It didn’t take much for him to put two and two together and realize that Coral, too, had been the oldest child in her family. She wore that responsibility like a badge of honor, just as he had done.
Biting his tongue, Treech finally approached her with a forced willingness to be open-mifnded. Over time, he learned to forgive Coral for killing Tanner and Lamina, but he never forgot her victims. What he’d previously mistaken for barbarousness had really just been Coral’s own pilgrimage of survival. And no one could blame her for choosing life. Not even Treech and his morbid, dark thoughts.
As time progressed, the conditions of the Games became different. The arenas that they found themselves in year after year were jarringly different from the one they had perished in. Their own arena had been practically prehistoric, a relic of the past where much kinder games had been previously played. Technology seemed to be quickly evolving in the Capitol, for the structure that housed the Hunger Games rapidly evolved over the years.
The Twenty Fifth Games finally unveiled the domelike arena that became the standard structure of the Games. While the dome remained constant, the terrain trapped underneath it varied each year. Atmospheres that Treech didn’t even know existed were suddenly sprawled in front of him every time he awoke. Dry deserts, snowy peaks, sticky rainforests, he and the other ghosts saw everything.
Coral and Mizzen claimed that the Thirty Seventh Games’ arena resembled the ocean of Four. Reaper’s lip curled with distaste when he noted that the wheat fields of the Thirty Ninth Games looked like Eleven’s sprawling agriculture. Wovey piped up that the Forty Third arena looked like the plains of Eight. Treech nearly cried when the Forty Seventh Games rolled around, for the woodland arena looked like an exact replica of Seven, down to its dewy forest floor and towering ponderosa pines.
During the Forty Seventh Games, there was someone that looked cruelly similar to Lamina, a girl from Six. He nearly gasped every time he saw her, startling hope rushing through his entire being just to go numb when he remembered that she wasn’t Lamina.
She couldn’t be, for Lamina was gone.
Tally was the tribute’s name. Her hair color was nearly identical to Lamina’s rusty red locks, although Tally wore hers in matching braids. As Treech watched her dart through the trees, braids bouncing on her shoulders, he was suddenly transported back to Seven’s schoolhouse, eleven years old and casting glances at the bowed head of a girl with stubby ginger braids
He blinked away tears that wouldn’t fall when Tally was finally taken out by, in a cruel twist of dramatic irony, the girl from Four.
Coral must have also put two and two together, for as soon as Tally’s body hit the forest floor, she found her way to Treech. Braving the fear of heights he knew she had, Coral climbed up the tree he was hiding in and sat down next to him, one sympathetic hand drifting to his shoulder. He didn’t need to ask, and she didn’t need to say anything, to know that she was silently apologizing for her own hand in a different ginger’s death. They didn’t leave that spot until the final cannon shot off, indicating that a boy from Ten was that year’s winner.
Treech saw Lamina in every act of mercy that the tributes of the Hunger Games produced. He saw her in Armo, a boy whose unluckiness made him District Five’s male tribute for the Twenty Eighth Games. When he stumbled upon the girl from Three’s cold corpse in the arena’s windy tundra, he wrapped her in his jacket and pressed a kiss to her cheek.
He saw Lamina in Lillis from Eleven, a tribute of the Forty Fourth Games who poured the last of her water supply into the mouth of a dying boy who was weeping about missing District Four’s ocean.
He saw Lamina in the Sixty First Games’ girl tribute from Ten, an eighteen-year-old named Anca, who drove a dagger into her own stomach, allowing a stunned twelve-year-old boy to be crowned that year's victor.
The pack alliance that seemed to crop up every Game sent Treech reeling with shame. The pack, or Careers as the tributes began to dub them beginning in the Fifty Third Games, was an undeniable ghost of Trech and Coral’s very own brutal alliance. Perhaps it was inevitable that the strongest players would join forces to take out the weaker kids, but it still filled him with rotting guilt. Especially when the Careers began their brutal hunt of the loner tributes, ones like Wovey. Ones like Lamina.
Over the years, Treech and his companions observed that the shape the tributes arrived in evolved into something more humane. Tributes began entering the arena decked out in expensive uniforms that matched a predetermined color palette. Some teenagers seemed to be sporting traces of glitter on their skin, their hair gelled up with some sort of product. Their faces appeared fuller, as if they had been fed well in the time leading up to their arrival in the arena.
Treech noticed that there always seemed to be one name dancing off the tip of tributes’ tongues as they tilted their heads towards the arena’s synthetic sky and cursed the heavens: Snow.
He knew exactly who they were referring to, too. The stoic blonde boy who had hitched a ride on their truck ride to the zoo had seemingly grown up and leaned into the evil Treech had seen swimming in his eyes all those years ago. And the Capitol’s society had been foolish enough to give him a pathway to power.
Treech was hungry for news of the outside world, but the batches of tributes tended to favor survival tactics over small talk. He shouldn’t have been surprised that they would be talking about how to find food and not the happenings of Panem.
He kept tabs on the tributes from District Seven whenever he could, following them around in hopes of gathering crumbs of information about his district, his comrades from Seven, his family members. Because there was no future for him, Treech was perpetually obsessed with the past. But each year, there was no news.
Until the Thirty Seventh Games, when a fourteen-year-old boy with glossy black curls from District Seven entered the arena bearing Treech’s father’s name. He didn’t need confirmation to know that the boy, Haru, was Aase’s son.
Treech was entirely unreachable and inconsolable for the duration of the Thirty Seventh Games. Ignoring the petitioning questions of his companions, he numbly trailed after Haru wherever he went, completely stunned at how much the boy looked like his brother.
That year’s arena was made up of a scorching hot beach that bordered a large saltwater reservoir. Haru was smart, avoiding the initial bloodbath and diving into the tropical brush when the Games began. He was tactful, cunning, and purposeful in his strategy of hiding.
Treech hovered over him like a helpless guardian, praying silently to death that it would not take his brother’s son. Haru didn’t make it hard to root for, either, he was smart. Smart like Lamina. Treech favored his odds of making it out alive.
He truly believed his nephew would live until suddenly a tribute from Twelve had a spiky sea creature in her hand and was driving it into Haru’s neck. Treech could only watch helplessly as his nephew toppled into the ebbing tide, veins of poison blossoming across his skin as he drowned in the low water.
When Treech awoke for the Thirty Eighth Games, the glaring loss of Haru joined the perpetual mourning of Lamina in his cold heart.
He tried to stay uninterested and indifferent about the tributes from Seven, unable to face any more loss than he’d already endured, but it was hard not to root for his own home district in the Capitol’s cruel game. He was really no better than the Capitolites themselves, choosing their favorite tributes and betting on their odds of survival.
The District Seven kids were uncannily familiar to him. He knew who they were before he even saw their district number on their uniforms. Cherry, a thirteen-year-old girl in the Forty First Games, wore her hair in an intricately braided crown that was a common style in Seven even when Treech was alive. Quennell of the Fifty Third Games bore a nasty scar on his arm that could only have been caused by a lumber yard ax. A seventeen-year-old named Daphne was humming an old folk song from Seven when the buzzer rang, kickstarting the Fifty Sixth Hunger Games. She was taken out in the first minute of the Games by a brutal girl from Two.
Blight of the Fifty Ninth Games, made Treech feel like he was staring into a mirror. The way the eighteen-year-old swung his ax with a dull, dutiful hand. How he watched over his twelve-year-old district partner with a tender fondness until she was decapitated by a wild-eyed tribute from One. The way he spoke to the night air, sending promises to his family that he would return home. Treech nearly cried with relief when Blight was airlifted out of the arena as that year’s victor.
He was positively baffled by Johanna Mason, crybaby-turned-vicious-spitfire of the Seventy First Games. His heart immediately lurched for her when he first saw her crying on her platform, her tears reminding him faintly of Lamina. But the second that the tribute count hit five, an ax materialized in Johanna’s and she went on a bloody tirade. Taking out the tributes from Four, Eight, and Eleven with ease, Johanna wielded her weapon with an assuredness no one had seen coming. Covered in blood and panting, she was crowned the victor.
District Seven tributes aside, Treech also watched over the doomed lovers of the Games like a hawk. Any time he saw a lingering gaze, a squeeze of the hand, he was on the scene. Romance was a devastating trend in the Hunger Games, for the competition would only ever produce one winner. Love did not conquer all in the Games' realm.
The results were devastating. During the Fiftieth Games, Treech had to watch with a heavy heart as the boy from Twelve held one of the girls from his district, her throat speared by a pink bird and gushing blood. He witnessed childhood sweethearts from Five get gutted by the Fifty Fifth Games’ Career Pack. He observed a boy from Three and a boy from Eight fall in love during the Sixty Seventh Games only to die in a freak accident caused by an avalanche.
In every devastating end of these romantic relationships, Lamina drifted into his thoughts. In any other Game, would their situation have been different? If they were Reaped for the Twelfth Games at ages seventeen and eighteen, would they have stuck together as they should have in the Tenth? Without a second thought, Treech would have driven his own ax into his chest if it meant that Lamina could make it out alive.
But better yet, what would their lives have been like had their names never been drawn at all? Would they have met in the streets of Seven, two strangers drawn together by an irresistible, undeniable urge? Would one of them have worked up the courage to finally kiss the other in the damp forests of Seven? Would Lamina have accepted Treech’s hand in marriage had he asked?
Treech shut down those silly hypotheticals every time they sparked hope in his heart. There was no future for him, with or without Lamina. He instead shoved his mind into the past where his memory traced the details of her face in the dim light of the zoo cage. Things were safe in the past.
Lovers never really stood a chance in the Games, anyway. Their stories lived on in Treech’s memory, serving as a devastating reminder of what he couldn’t have.
The Seventy Fourth Hunger Games proved to be a real challenge for Treech.
When he rose up from the ground into a standing position, he couldn’t help but feel that this would be a particularly unique year for the Games. Catching Coral’s eye and glancing at Reaper as they hovered behind the new batch of tributes he could tell that they were thinking the same thing.
The bloodbath was particularly gory that year. The pent-up energy of the Career Pack was undeniably high that year and they charged into battle with the fervor of warriors. Neither tribute from Seven made it past the first five minutes of the attack.
The duo from Twelve was particularly noteworthy for the duration of the Games, the girl’s sullenness combatting the boy’s bright charms. They were an odd duo, one that went their separate ways when the competition first began. Just as Treech and Lamina had done.
Standing behind Peeta as he looked up at Katniss in the tree, suddenly Treech was transported back to his own Games, helpless and useless as he gazed up at the girl he loved. Maybe he was projecting, who knew if Peeta loved his district partner or not? And Katniss, so flighty and somber, certainly didn’t seem to reciprocate whatever feelings Peeta had for her. In witnessing this, Treech was suddenly hit with the embarrassing realization that perhaps Lamina hadn’t loved him back.
He remained suspicious of Katniss even after she found Peeta and nursed him back to health.
The other tributes in the Seventy Fourth Games were uncanny as well. Treech saw Mizzen’s understated deadliness in Clove. He saw Reaper’s brotherly love for Dill in Thresh. Cato’s misguided bloodlust mirrored Coral’s own previous morals. Rue’s sweet innocence resonated with Wovey on a deeper level. It was no wonder that Treech’s ghostly companions gravitated towards the very tributes that mirrored their own characteristics. While he kept tabs on the "lovers," he watched his friends hover over their undeniable counterparts.
Treech didn’t truly see himself as anyone, although the girl from Five intrigued him. He wondered how things would have gone for him if he had used a strategy like hers: sticking to himself, stealing from others, remaining hidden in the shadows. Maybe that strategy wouldn’t have hurt Lamina so much.
Treech and his companions gasped in shock when the nightlock berries came out in the last minutes of the Seventy Fourth Games. Wovey hid her face in Treech’s jacket as Reaper instinctively turned a gaping Mizzen away from the scene.
“Well, that’s new,” Coral mumbled, her voice laced with the dull shock that they were all undoubtedly feeling.
“Surely they won’t,” Reaper scoffed, although Treech pinpointed fearful worry in his milky eyes.
He seethed with silent, jealous rage when Katniss and Peeta were declared the dual winners of the Seventy Fourth Hunger Games. Their berry trick, that stupidly genius trick, had worked. They would be going home together, off to continue a facade of love that wasn't real for at least one party.
Treech knew he should have been happy that two people were making it out alive for the very first time, but why wasn’t that an option over sixty years ago? Why hadn’t there been poisonous berries in the Tenth Games' arena?
When the usual mist came to collect the five ghosts, Treech saw Lamina as he always did. And just like always, she was devastatingly out of reach.
The Seventy Fifth Hunger Games finally ended the grating purgatory cycle.
When Treech awoke from his usual slumber, face down as always, he found himself in the center of a rocky structure in the water. Pathways of rock jutted out into the water like spikes on a wheel, a tribute balanced on each end.
But the tributes were not children. They were previous victors, ones that Treech and his friends had rooted for, ones they had tailed throughout all the various arenas. And they were back again to fight to the death, the luck that previously carried them to victory apparently gone with the wind.
Coral and Mizzen were inconsolable when they saw Mags, her hair now gray and knotted as were her knuckles. Wovey turned away to weep into Treech’s shoulder when she caught sight of Woof. Reaper frowned in defeat as he laid eyes on Chaff. Treech’s own ghostly brow crumpled when he saw both Johanna and Blight.
And then his eyes found Peeta and Katniss.
The duo from Twelve, the ones who had fooled the world into believing that they were lovers. He wanted to scream, cry, throw up, melt into a puddle. Things were supposed to be different for them whether their love was real or not. Things were supposed to be better.
The loss was unspeakable in the Seventy Fifth Games. All of the tributes that Treech and his companions had previously willed to live were suddenly asked to do the unthinkable all over again. The previous victors dropped like flies as that year’s arena tested them to no end, as did the revolutionary plot that appeared to be brewing.
Something bigger was happening this time around. Factions were clear among the tributes and they all seemed to be working towards a larger, loftier goal than just survival. The tributes from Four and Twelve split off together, but not before Finnick checked in with the pair from Seven and Three. Treech swore he heard the name Heavensbee tossed around, accompanied by Revolution and Mockingjay.
Still, plot or not plot, the consequences of the Games remained the same. Treech comforted Wovey and Reaper when the vicious duo from Two speared Woof and Seeder in the initial bloodbath. He held a limp and unresponsive Coral in his arms when Mags disappeared into the deadly fog. And they all did the same for him when Blight, blinded by the horrendous raining blood, hit the forcefield and died on impact.
There was something different about Peeta and Katniss, too. While Peeta’s longing gaze and eager attention remained consistent, it was Katniss that had changed. Treech watched, open-mouthed, as she screamed Peeta’s name while Finnick pushed life back into his chest, when she grinned shyly after Peeta placed a pearl into her palm, how she kissed him with real passion on the beach as the sun dipped behind them.
The charade of love that had first made them victors was utterly and undeniably real in the Seventy Fifth Hunger Games. It was all Treech had wanted, for Katniss to love Peeta back, and yet his stomach sank with despair as he pictured the girl he would have given a pearl to. The girl he would have kissed senseless had he not been such a fool.
Treech and his friends regrouped in the lightning tree during Beetee’s plot to wipe out the remaining Career victors. They hadn’t planned to meet up, but some unseen force drew them all towards the central tree. Silently, they climbed it right as Beetee stabbed a knife into the forcefield, sending him flying backwards. None of them reacted to action, something deep within them telling them that he was not dead.
“Something big is about to happen,” Mizzen commented dully, swinging his legs over one of the branches.
“You can feel it too?” Reaper took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair, sending the snake around his neck hissing threateningly.
“There’s Finnick,” Coral spoke up, nodding down to the shadowed figure of the District Four victor below as he called out for Katniss.
“And there’s Katniss.” Treech pointed her out, crouched in a bush, an arrow notched in her bow. The weapon was pointed directly at Finnick.
“She won’t kill him,” Wovey whispered, cradling one of her snakes in her lap. “She won’t.”
Treech didn’t answer, for Katniss was truly a wildcard to him. He never seemed to be able to guess her next move. Perhaps that was her most useful tactic.
“Remember who the real enemy is, Katniss,” Finnick’s faint voice warned.
“The Careers,” Mizzen supplied.
“The Hunger Games,” Wovey added.
“The Capitol.” Reaper frowned.
“Oppression,” Coral vocalized.
As if hearing their answers, Katniss faltered down on the ground. Treech noticed a newfound determination in her eyes, fiery and rebellious, as she wrapped Beetee’s wire around one of her arrows. It was in that moment that he knew Katniss was the key to ending the Capitol's tyrannical Games.
Without a second of hesitation, he watched her cock her bow and send an arrow into the swirling arena dome overhead. The world above them exploded as the lightning struck the tree, sending the ghosts flying.
In slow motion, Treech careened through the air. The usual mist that always came to collect them at the end of the Games materialized in the air, mixing with the crackling sparks of electricity caused by Katniss’s arrow.
To his right, he could hear Wovey and Mizzen laughing. He turned to the left to see Coral and Reaper, their faces strangely serene as the wind whipped around them.
His surroundings swirled as they always did, but something was different. He didn’t feel the dread of being pulled into another year’s slumber, he felt startlingly light. The pain in his eyes, the cause of his death, ebbed away as his face relaxed.
A girl appeared in front of him, making his heart soar with hope. Lamina. The last thing he always saw before he was dragged into unconsciousness. She looked as beautiful and hazy as she always did.
He sighed in content, as grateful to see her as he always was. But as he waited for her to disappear and for his vision to fade to darkness, nothing happened. If anything, the light got brighter and Lamina became clearer. His breath caught in his throat as he captured her with his gaze.
She drifted closer and closer until suddenly she was directly in front of him. “Treech.”
“Lamina,” he breathed out, practically knocked back in shock. Never had she been so close before, so tangible. Not since they walked together in the land of the living.
“Are you ready?” She asked, plain and simple.
Treech was ready for many things. He was ready to stop witnessing Hunger Games after Hunger Games, death after death. He was ready to fall on his knees and beg Lamina for forgiveness and tell her he loved her until she ordered him to shut up. He was ready to see an end to the Capitol’s system of oppression.
And so, he nodded.
With Lamina’s hand to guide him, Treech finally crossed over.