She's spent the last three weeks looking for Eponine. Three weeks of surviving off of meager meals and sticking close to the water, knowing that the girl would try to find a place of sustenance. Three weeks of watching the sky every night and clutching the fabric of her shirt in her hand whenever the count from District 3 appeared. Three long, long weeks.

She looks the worse for the wear. Her hair has gone from a practical braid to a rat's nest. Mud has soaked her clothing and caked itself over her arms and neck like a protective coating. Her eyes are tired, and her lips twitch and tic. The constant vigilance has exhausted her, and she's slept with nothing but faith and leaves piled atop her as protection.

Tonight, she looks up at the sky, biting her lip as the funeral dirge plays, and when Eponine's face peers down from the sky, the air sucks itself out of her chest. Eponine stares back down, nearly blank-faced, mouth slightly parted, the slightest hint of fear knitted into one of her eyebrows.

For the first time in a long time, Eva sits and cries. She wraps her head in her arms and sobs, deep wrenching gasps that sound like the collisions of tectonic plates down within her. She cries until her voice is just a whisper when she mutters to herself, until her tear ducts are sore and swollen, until her lungs are sore from contracting and expelling. Until it's daybreak.

And then she resists the urge to lay in the mud awhile, and picks herself up. Crosses herself. So, she can't save the girl. She knew it was a long shot to start with. It amazes her at how deeply it hurts, how in pulling open the stitches to the wound of Eponine she's aggravated the injury of her missing son. How the images of the two have started to mesh into her mind into one nebulous figure. Spiteful, talkative, rebellious, long-suffering. Brave.

And dead.

For the next few days, she subsists. She plots. She's aware of the stakes of this Arena, and she knows that with her dies all the secrets she's been collecting will have gone with her. It's the one thing she can't allow.

She finds the labs. She finds a box of moldy, stale cookies and an old vending machine with a can of soda still wedged in the bottom. She soaks rags in the soda and chews on them as she wanders through the area and finds herself a pen. With that in hand, she scrawls on the wall until the ink is all dry: the poems of Lorca and Neruda and Eliot, with the occasional word misspelled or altered, hidden only for the keen of eye and educated to notice. Code. She scratches words into the wall with her nails. The Capitol will broadcast this as a crazed Mentor losing her mind, and her cache will be preserved digitally.

All her secrets put into concrete, she leaves the lab and goes back into the woods. She's unsatisfied with this solution. It's an attempt, but nothing solid. And so she plans to win and render it moot.

In the jungle she hears the subtle crack of footfalls over dry leaves near her, ten yards away, and stops. With heaviness she realizes that there's no need to identify her foe; she has no allies left this Arena. She needn't waste time memorizing a face, and so she lifts her spear, and follows her spear forward in rushing at Wyatt's gut.

Eva's braced for her spear to hit meat, and instead it just snags an inch of flesh and then goes past it. The movement means that she's thrown forward, off-balance, and right in the line of Wyatt's own spear as it comes down in a strike. The pole smacks between her shoulder and her neck, and she feels tingling zap down to her fingertips. She hits her knees.

By now they're within a foot of each other, too close for the spear to remain a useful weapon, but Eva's hand is already dropping the spear and grabbing the shank she's keeping in her belt. She throws a punch at Wyatt's gut and brings the shiv up in a wild swing, aiming for face and neck both.

She's locked into this fight now. She doubts she'll be able to run and escape fast enough unless she can wound him more than she has already.

"Ah!" She's yanked upwards, the vulnerable areas of her body yawning into view. Her hand with the weapon incapacitated in his fist, she uses her other. It launches forward like a striking snake and closes over his throat, moving to crush. Her fingernails clench in an attempt to outright rip his windpipe out.

But Eva already knows she's lost. The truth rings in her head like a siren, blotting out all the rest of the sounds. She's going to die, and her years of work will die with her, and the Capitol will trudge on. Some rough hellbeast sloughing her off its feet like dried mud.

She feels the impact of the handle against her skin more than she feels the blade going in. She sees the spray of blood against his shirt before she realizes what's happened.

Eva is no stranger to pain. She's suffered it a hundred times, and she would a hundred more. She's been starved, tortured, isolated, terrorized. She's lost a child. Pain doesn't register.

Death, however, does. For a split second she continues to clutch at his throat, wrist yanking to drive her fingertips in, and then she lets go. Back down to her knees. This time when she brings her hand up it's not in a fist, but in a universal open-palmed gesture, accompanied by a word so ludicrous in this scenario that it may as well be a slur.

"Wait."

She falls to her hip, and then, one hand holding her wound to her like an infant, collapses onto her side.

"I know," she says, finding it suddenly difficult to speak. Her words are bottlenecking, a million things to say and the time in which to say them constricting. She takes a deep breath, trying to sort them into something.

I'm sorry. A proper courtesy to give to the person you just tried to kill, you spurred to killing you. Eva doesn't plan to waste time on that unless she finds herself lingering.

I'm scared. Honest, but humiliating. She dismisses that one. Her throat makes little convulsions and she realizes she's trying to cry. She grips the deep puncture into her side as blood spills between her fingers.

"The spear was poisoned. You'll need medicine." She winces and tries to prop herself on one arm, to better see him, to look him in the eye. She can't forget that there are cameras everywhere, auditing what may very well be her final words. She can't forget that she must strategize even now. "I'm a Victor from District Nine..."

"If I'm lucky, there won't be a next time." Her voice feels like a clawed animal crawling out of her throat.

Wyatt Earp. The almost-victor of so many Arenas in the Never-Ending Quell. Eva's watched him from the relative safety of the Capitol as he lost friends, lost faith, felt himself shaken from the core. Under the excuse of 'studying' she's voyeuristically relived her Arena from thirty-eight years ago.

She's glad it was him. He's someone who can stop and listen. She forces herself to sit up, even as the blood drains from her face, turning it from tan to a shale-ish sallow. The world spins, sludgy, and drips out of view.

"The labs. I wrote...I wrote some things down at the labs. They're the last thing I could do for my son." A strange sort of smirk rolls across one side of her face. "Think of it as a posthumous lullaby."

Her head keens to the side like an overturning boat. "It's important."

"You're a good man." The Arena takes a lot of good men. Eva doesn't tend to mourn them if they aren't from her District. There's something admirable that after so many Arenas (seven? eight?) it's still something that can be said about him.

"The center cannot hold," she whispers, quoting poetry without thinking about it, the words slipping from between her lips. "I wanted to live long enough to find him again. I learned everything I could. I learned everything."

She leans in close and hopes her whisper is quiet enough that only he can hear it. "They're running scared from us, for once."

Her eyes roll back slightly; her mouth parts and her body goes slack against Wyatt's hands. After so many years of fighting, the tension leaks out and for a moment, Eva is at peace.