FicWad

Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Thomson is smart. He is not going to stick around the Cornucopia any longer than he needs to. It does not take a genius to figure out that if twenty-four kids run all into one place to collect weapons and survival kits, that there is going to be a lot of blood shed, and a lot of kids dying within the first ten minutes of this so-called tournament. He refuses to be one of those kids. Instead, when the gong sounded, Jeremy focused on the small, insignificant items that served as outliers for the big guns. He ran in just far enough to snatch a water canteen from the grips of a mean-looking black boy, and a highlighter-yellow pack, and ran away. He ran as fast and as far as he could, until he tripped and fell right into a stream.

Boy, wizards are scary, he muses, pulling himself out of the water. I thought they were supposed to be kind-hearted heroes who helped mortals, not evil blood-thirsty bastards. Everything Jeremy had ever read about magic and wizards was disproved when those crazies who called themselves "Death Eaters" came to his school and announced that "four lucky students are going to be given the honour of competing in this year's 'Phoenix Games' tournament."

"Some luck, I've got," Jeremy mumbles as he strips himself of the tee-shirt and sweater and wrings them out. "Move to a new school, get chosen for this damned competition which just insures that I'll be killed, and now I fall into a creek. Just my luck." Jeremy lays his shirt and jacket out over a boulder and debates wringing out his pants as well. He considers his chances of running into anyone else and decides that this place is far too large for them to be all that great and pulls off his pants, wringing them out and laying them lover a relatively low branch.

"I guess I can check this pack now," he sighs. It's a really unfortunate colour, and makes his eyes hurt just glancing at it. Why ever a colour like this was invented, Jeremy did not know, but he did have a desire to go back in time to rough up this bloke so that it never would be. With colours like orange and pink, and the blues and the greens, and the purples, yellow highlighters were no longer necessary. Jeremy shook his head pathetically. "I am thinking about highlighters when at any second my life can be over. Brilliant there, Thomson."

"Do you make it a habit to talk to yourself?"

The voice is female, and only recently familiar. Jeremy's attention is brought to searching his immediate surroundings, looking for the source of the sound. What he finds is a girl of about seventeen years. Her dark hair hangs over one shoulder as if she had just pulled the elastic from her ponytail, and her even darker eyes are fixed on Jeremy, an amused smirk playing on her face. She's one of the kids from his school, older than Jeremy by about three years, and the oldest out of all of the "Muggles," they had been called.

Graves, he remembers. Her name is Felicity Graves. The sort of girl that makes Jeremy nervous, not just because she's pretty. Jeremy can find something to call pretty about almost every girl he ever meets. No, Graves doesn't make Jeremy nervous because she's pretty. It isn't because she's a lot older than he is either. Graves makes Jeremy nervous because of her everything. The way her arms are folded over chest while her fingers tap at her bicep. The way her head is slightly cocked forward as if expecting something from him.. The arch of her right eyebrow and how the left one seems to slit in the middle, part of it curving upwards while the rest of it continues forward as if it had never stopped. The authorative tone in her voice. The way her eyes seem to take everything in all at once, and the way she actually listens to the whole story with a stoic expression that makes one wonder if she's actually listening. How she seems unable to make direct eye contact whe she's speaking, but looks directly into someone's eyes while they talk to her. The way she is's staring at him right now.

"Okay, then do you make it a habit to strip naked when there are twenty others out here looking to kill you?" Graves asks another question when Jeremy fails to answer the first one. She shoots a pointed look towards the branch with his pants hanging off of them and the other eyebrow comes up, the strange one that Jeremy can't help staring at whenever he sees her.

"I... I don't... I'm not... naked...." Jeremy stutters, as he tries to explain, scrambling to put the boulder between his exposed body and Felicity Graves. "I - I - I just fell. Into the - into the stream. I fell."

"You do realize that the first resource anyone with a bit of common sense will look for is water, don't you?" Graves tosses the question out casually, as if she's asking which football team is going to win next week's match. Jeremy can feel himself pale. He had just been priding himself on being so smart - before he fell into the stream, that is. Now he feels like the biggest dunce to have existed. Of course, everyone would want to find water, it was something the survival people had explained, and Jeremy was sure that everyone had talked to them at least once.

"I thought you might have that reaction. What's in the bag?"

"I - I haven't... I haven't looked in - in it. - yet."

"Well let's get to it then," Graves pushes off from her tree to sit against the boulder behind which Jeremy was trying to hide. "I won't bite." She tell him after a long moment in which Jeremy stares at the back of her head, trying to figure out what she's playing at. Before today Felicity Graves barely glanced over him, now she's talking to him as if they'd been friends all along. More than friends, from the way she seems to expect Jeremy to sit next to her, wearing nothing but the boxer briefs he was issued this morning.

"Um... right. One - one moment." Jeremy snatches his pants from the branch and struggles to pull them back on. They are still wet.

"Hurry up, kid. I don't suppose you've forgotten there are people out here who want to kill us."

"You can be one of them," Jeremy mutters under his breath. It's another thing that's bothered him since Graves showed up. Why is she being so nice? Well, not nice, but she hasn't attempted to kill him yet. She's actually being almost helpful, like they were supposed to be a team. Not that Jeremy is opposed to it... he doesn't think so anyway. He hadn't considered that he didn't need to do this alone, that he could have someone else help him until one of them died.

"You think I'm here to kill you?" Graves scoffs and it almost sounds bitter. "If I wanted to kill you, I could have waited until you'd done something stupid, like fall asleep in the sun while you wait for your clothes to dry. I could have stolen your things and drowned you in that river and you'd have never known what hit you." The blunt, unflinching way Graves makes this obseervation is unnerving for Jeremy. Not that he had ever expected anyone to explain to him how they'd like to kill him, but if it did happen it wouldn't have been so conversational. "But we're Muggles. We don't stand a chance against those wizards unless we stick together. I mean, God, they must have trained all year for this thing! Since they were kids! I don't expect they'll have shown us their real skills last week."

"But y-you... You don't... You don't even like me." accused Jeremy.

"How do you know who I do and don't like? Besides, it isn't a matter a preference, but a matter of survival. I watched one of them kill a boy with her bare hands, then run Lauren through with a sword. I'm telling you, kid, they're bred to kill. We need to help each other. Stick together." Jeremy could not have come up with an argument if he wanted to. The tone of Graves' voicce tells him that her words are final. Without a word, he begins pulling things out of the highlighter yellow pack. A knife, which Graves tucks into the waistband of her pants; a soft, black blanket; a bottle no bigger than the palm of his hand labeled "Swelling Solution;" another, smaller knife; and a pair of fluffly earmuffs. All of this, plust the water bottle he had snatched from the fingertips of the black boy from earlier. Jeremy clips this to his belt while he replaced the supplies in the bag.

"Not the best spoils," Graves acknowledges, "but they'll do for now."

"Can't - can't we go... go to the Cornucopia? Back to it, I mean? There could be something left."

Graves nods as she shoulders Jeremy's pack - their pack now. "Smart boy. Let's go then." Jeremy rushes to follow, tripping and even running into a tree as he struggles back into his still-wet tee shirt.

Jeremy had been impressed with his speed and thought he had gotten quite far away from the Cornucopia in a short amount of time. He was sure that he had never ran like that in his life, and in a forest no less! However, when he and Graves arrive just within sight of the clearing they'd started in, Jeremy realizes that he actually hadn't gone very far at all. If it weren't for Felicity Graves, he would have probably died before nightfall. Bodies litter the clearing, and he's reminded of the girl Graves had mentioned, the one who killed with her bare hands. Definitely dead before nightfall.

"Good, they're gone," Graves mumbles. Turning to Jeremy she tells him, "We need to be quick, okay? I can't be sure, but it would make a lot of sense that someone is still close. Not everyone went straight for the Cornucopia. If it were me, I'd stay here and pick off anyone who returned." Graves regards the clearing while leaning against a tree, chewing at a fingernail. Jeremy watches her, unsure if she's expecting something from him or if she's deciding on a plan.

Jeremy steps out from the cover of trees. "I'll go in then," he offers.

"What the hell are you doing kid, get back here!" Graves runs forward and shoves him back into the trees. "Didn't I tell you," she hisses with a quick glance backwards, "we need to be careful! We don't know if anyone is out - ah!" Graves gasps quickly, her eyes growing wide and back stiffening.

"You need to run," she whispers seriously.

"B-But - "

"No excuses, kid. Run fast and be smart. Go now." Graves sounds as if she's struggling to get her words out. She gasps again, and when she falls to her knees, Jeremy sees the feather fletching of two arrows portruding from her neck.

Without another word, Jeremy takes off, back the way he'd come, berating himself the whiole time. He just killed Felicity Graves. He didn't shoot the arrow, but she was shot because he was stupid and impulsive and didn't have sense enough to just wait for Graves to finish sizing up the situation. Clearly, Graves told him that she would ambush anyone who returned to the Cornucopia, and Jeremy had disregarded that, trying to be the hero. Because that's what it had come down to, he wanted to be a hero. He wanted to run into the Cornucopia and collect the things they needed and make camp somewhere for the night. He didn't want to keep feeling stupid around her, and wanted Graves to nod and call him, "smart boy," again, or better yet, "brave boy," with a smile. He had wanted Graves to see that he could think for himself sometimes. Jeremy sure did think for himself. He thought with the full capacity of the greatest dunce in existence.

Jeremy doesn't stop running until his thighs sting, lungs ache, and throat burns with dryness. Then, he collapses onto the ground grasping for the already-full water bottle at his belt. He struggles to unhook the bottle for a moment before it's in his hands, and he can't seemt ot get the top off fast enough. His throat tingles refreshingly as he chugs the water down, and Jeremy sighs in relief. Drinking so much of his water like that probably didn't count as "smart" in Felicity Grave's book. Oh, well, there would be plenty more water if Jeremy could find the river again. Drinking river water is not exactly something he looked forward to, but he doesn't have many options available to him.

Jeremy takes a shaky breath as he thinks up a plan. So he can't access the Cornucopia. That did not mean he couldn't get any more supplies or weapons. He'll just have to find someone else who does... He takes another breath... That's something Graves would have suggested, right? There had to be a bunch of others left, most of them with something better than a blanket and a knife... Standing up, Jeremy begins walking in a random direction.

He wondered, f he were Felicity Graves, how would he tackle this plan? For one thing he wouldn't make a whole bunch of noise. Jeremy didn't know how she did it, but Graves barely made a noise while she lead him to the Cornucopia. Without Graves threre to teach him, Jeremy just had to experiment and figure it out on his own. He started by stepping lightly on his toes. Satisfied that that made significantly less noise, Jeremy continues forward.

Why is it so hard to take a simple breath? Jeremy isn't sure, but he thinks that maybe his throat is getting tighter... It's definitely getting hard to swallow.... He takes another sip of water, hoping to loosen the muscle.... The water still tingles as he swallows it down and he realizes that if anything his throat only feels like it's getting tighter. His tongue starts to feel heavy in his mouth. God, what was wrong with him? This was worse than that time he had an allergic reaction and his throat almost swelled shut -

Anti-Swelling Solution.

Panicking, Jeremy shimmies the backpack off of his shoulders and fumbles for the zippers. He knows that panicking is not being smart at all. In fact, it's the complete opposite. In any emergency situation they always warn, "don't panic." However, Jeremy can't help it. He can barely breathe and is starting to feel lightheaded. Anyone, at any moment, can come along and kill him. Not that it would make much of a difference he'll be dead in less than five minutes unless he can get to that bottle of swelling solution.

When Jeremy finally gets a hold of the bottle, he can barely pull in a breath, let alone think straight. Even so, he finds it embarrassing that this might be how he dies. An allergic reaction to water. How pathetic is that? As Jeremy attempts to twist the top, vision steadily blurring, he realizes the best part of all of this (or perhaps, most pathetic):

The bottle is child-proofed.