Author Games: Panem Entangled

When Given A Friend | Entries 1-6

District 1 Male: Morgan Ruidhir

 When Morgan emerged from slumber, his mind still streaming with that thick, white fog, the first thing he saw was another boy. He couldn't make much sense of the other boy, considering that Morgan was still half asleep, but he knew that the boy was Nereus and that the two of them should not be together.

Nereus sat a few feet away from Morgan, his knees crossed, his gaze directed toward a nearby window. They were inside, Morgan realized, trapped in some hallway with metal walls and a low ceiling. If Morgan stood, he could reach an arm up and touch the deep-set fluorescent lights. But he did not stand. He continued to lie there and look at Nereus, while Nereus sat and looked elsewhere.

Nereus's arms had been damaged. Deep, red cuts dug into his skin, and some of the pockmarks were still wet, leaving smears of crimson where Nereus had wiped the blood away. His face had been mostly protected, but a single line of red ran down his cheek. He breathed softly and shallowly, as if the air barely entered his lungs before Nereus pushed it out again.

Something was wrong with him. He'd clearly been wounded, but the way he held his arms made it seem as if he barely felt the pain. His eyes, though, communicated something that Morgan could not understand. He'd breathe in, and he'd breathe out, and his face would remain exactly the same, stoic and solemn and sad.

Morgan was good at detecting energies. He'd fallen out of practice since coming to the Capitol—no one felt like anything at the Capitol—but Nereus had always reminded him of what energy looked like, how it behaved. The first moment he'd seen Nereus's face in the green room, Morgan had felt as if he'd beheld something truly limitless, brilliant in its power and remarkable in its containment. Thinking back on it, the way Morgan had felt should have frightened him. Power destroyed, and containment could be defied. But Morgan had sensed a warmth instead, as if the energy he had perceived were tingling in his chest. It had spared him, and he had felt no fear.

Today Morgan appraised Nereus again, looking upon him with eyes still blurred from sleep. His gaze moved from the dark, tousled hair to the full lips, from the handful of freckles on his face to the countless gashes on his arms. Morgan took it all in, and then he took it all in again. For a moment, Morgan thought that he might be too sleepy to properly judge things, that his intuition had dampened.

But Morgan was not mistaken, and the truth fell upon him like a weight. Over the course of the Games, Nereus Ramsay had faded.

It wasn't that Nereus was blank, like the throngs of people that had populated the Capitol. It wasn't that he'd become boring, or that Morgan had desensitized himself to the way that Nereus felt. It was as if someone had taken an eyedropper and sucked the color out of his body, leaving grays and blacks. It was as if his sharp edges had been sanded down just slightly, too far to preserve the original shape but not far enough to create something new. It was as if parts of him had disappeared and, if Morgan waited too long, the fraction that remained would dissolve into nothing.

Morgan felt hollow. Something had disappeared inside of Morgan, too, something that had glimmered inside his chest until it had realized that Nereus was almost gone. Until just now, Morgan hadn't even noticed it there in the first place.

Morgan might have pondered this further had he not spotted a knife on the ground. It lay between the two boys, but the blade was pointed toward Nereus. Suddenly, all of Morgan's memory flooded back into his mind, and he flinched.

Before he'd gone unconscious, Nereus had intended to kill him.

No. No, Morgan had thought that Nereus intended to kill him. The difference came burning into stark, uncomfortable clarity as Morgan realized that Nereus had woken before he had.