This would be breathtakingly beautiful if it wasn’t so horrifying. Sitting up high enough to see clouds, Leanne felt as though she was in her element, quite literally. But it was wrong, and tainted with death and despair. She had never thought to be back feeling this way again, who expected it to happen twice?
Unafraid of heights, Leanne had found a perch to hang her legs down from and think. Shed some tears, lament not getting to know some of the people she had only seen die. When was her turn? Or Ambrose’s? No one had killed anyone else, they just died from external effects and Leanne wondered if it wasn’t the enemy they were supposed to be fighting using magic beyond belief to deal out these deaths. Maybe because they had mostly refused to fight one another.
She rubbed her eyes, pulling one leg up to rest her chin on one knee. “Is this how we lose? Being wrangled about and killed by “nature”? Not even getting to fight properly? At least last time we got to fight. A lot of us died but we...It made a difference.”
Ambrose wished he had something encouraging to offer Leanne, but the truth was that this was precisely what he’d expected. It wouldn’t be right to say out-loud, so he’d tried not to.
But Leanne was asking him directly now, and he didn’t think lying and pretending he thought they’d all make it out would help, either.
“This is what the arena does,” he said with a heavy sigh as he sat down beside her. Their combined magic could keep them warm indefinitely, as long as they were conscious, so Ambrose wasn’t worried much about the elements yet. He was worried about mountain lions, blizzards and rock slides, though. “The gamemakers would prune the competition one way or another. Of course, the children were much more ruthless than we are.” He couldn’t imagine this made for entertainment, however, and he had no idea what purpose any of this had except to knock them out of commission. “I tried teleporting again, to no avail. If we had candles, I would suggest I try astral projection. I might be able to reach Sabrina that way.”
“You mean those books you all keep mentioning?” Leanne asked. She was from before they had been published or made into features, apparently, but the more she heard about them the more it sounded like exactly what was going on here. “Weren’t they raised to expect it? That’s what makes them ruthless. We weren’t.”
Pausing, Leanne blinked, smirked, and raised her wand. “Accio candles!” Nothing happened. Obviously. She put the wand down and sighed again. “I can’t apparate either. That’d be too easy.”
Ambrose shook his head. “No, I don’t think that’s entirely it,” he disagreed. “It’s more that they knew they didn’t have another choice if they wanted to live, and they understood the only way they could live was by picking off the competition and gaining support from the viewers.” Which undoubtedly meant that they would have to put on a good show. A shiver went down his spine. It was truly evil, what the government made the children do in that world.
He was a bit disappointed that the magic didn’t work, but not surprised. If it’d been that easy, they would’ve done it much sooner. “Well -- perhaps if this is anything like what I’ve read about,” he started, leaning against Leanne’s shoulder a touch more, “someone’s watching us, too.” As he looked up at the sky, he wondered how much of this arena was like what he’d read about. Were people watching? Did they know? He didn’t expect anyone could support them like the viewers could in Panem, but he did wonder how much everyone could see.
“Well I’m not bloody doing it. I’ve had to shoot my wand to kill before but those people were evil, they wanted a regime based on supremacy, oppression and hate and they attacked my school. This isn’t that.” Leanne replied, crossing her arms. Her disposition softened once Ambrose leaned against her shoulder and she relaxed a bit, knocking her knee against his as if responding. After blinking at his supposition as he looked up at the sky, she looked too. “You mean the enemy or people back in Atlantis? I don’t know what’s worse. Either way it’s bollocks to be watched while going through all this. It’s bollocks to be in this beautiful place and be so miserable.”
Just then Leanne looked down and over to her side to find something odd. A pine cone in itself wasn’t odd, but there was a certain almost neon yellow glow to the underside of it. Leanne reached for it and touched something viscous, which caused her to make a sound of disgust before she turned it. “Oh, wow. A frog! Look Ambrose it’s so… tiny.”
He imagined both were watching, their enemy and all of Atlantis, but before he could say so, Ambrose’s attention was drawn to what Leanne was pointing out. The next few seconds passed slowly -- or too quickly, he wasn’t sure -- and he felt like he was frozen in place, unable to tell her to stop or to be careful before it was too late.
Leanne started feeling an odd tightness and numbness in her hand that caused her to drop the pine cone. Slowly, she became unable to feel her hand at all, and her arm felt tingly too, as though she’d been sitting on it. Her fingers contracted oddly as if she was straining them even though she hadn’t moved at all, much to Leanne’s confusion. “What-?”
The colour of the frog was a dead giveaway once he’d seen it, and Ambrose’s eyes went wide. “Oh, no, no, this isn’t happening,” he muttered, reaching out to put an arm around her. He’d always said the arena would find a way. “What do you feel? Leanne?”
“What are you on about-?” She asked, numbness setting in so slowly that she didn’t understand what Ambrose was suddenly frightened of. Maybe he didn’t like frogs. She watched the little yellow thing hop away as more of her body felt numb and rigid; it would hurt if she could feel, she was fairly certain. But she couldn’t, really, nor could she move her own arms of her own accord even though her fingers were spasming now. As if on cue when Ambrose asked, Leanne assessed herself; she felt a hardness in her throat, tightness in her chest and she all but collapsed against Ambrose.
“I feel numb, but look!” She was terrified, skin clammy and eyes wide as she called Ambrose’s attention to her spasming fingers. Both hands, now. Her legs collapsed, stretched onto the ground even though Leanne hadn’t made them do so. She couldn’t, after a while, count how long this had gone on for, but her whole body now felt various degrees of numb, muscles spasming and body parts shaking.
“Leanne? Leanne, stay with me,” he pleaded, holding onto her as he felt her lose control of her muscles. He could feel them tremble under his fingertips, despite her best efforts to try. Desperately, he looked around them for something, anything, he could use to create an antidote, because it was increasingly clear that what was happening was because of the little frog.
Leanne tried to look at Ambrose but her eyes couldn’t focus, she could only roll them, blinking rapidly. She mumbled and murmured unintelligible things as her voice came out garbled and strangled. “Am- Ambrose… I’m wrong, I’m wrong-”
There was nothing nearby, however, and no time. Brewing a potion would take minutes that he didn’t know if they had. Faintly, he thought they should have stayed near everyone else. He should have insisted on that instead of retreating.
“Hey, you’re okay.” He bent his head a little, offering as much of a smile as he could manage. “I’m gonna take care of you, okay?”
Trying desperately to hold onto anything that wasn’t what was happening with her body, Leanne did her best to look up at Ambrose but her body was no longer under her command, and soon she was convulsing quite rhythmically. Her heart, meanwhile, beat far too quickly and with no set rhythm at all, and all this made breathing difficult. She tried to open her mouth, gasping for air, but her lungs felt numb and all the movement made her breath ragged and interrupted. Though almost completely lying down now, Leanne felt dizzy, on the edge of loss of consciousness.
Trying to speak again only garnered a desperate cry out of her, followed by another gasp for air that did absolutely nothing. Her senses, the ones that were left, seemed dangerously close to slipping away despite her continued motion.
What was happening to Leanne was terrifying and brutal, and it was making Ambrose’s head swim. He’d seen death before and wasn’t afraid of it. He wouldn’t have been able to work in the mortuary if he had been, and the witches and warlocks in their coven weren’t afraid of violence. But this? This made his hands tremble and his vision blur.
In his panic, it slowly occurred to him that there was something he could do. He couldn’t brew a potion to save her, but there was something else … he prayed to the Dark Lord that Sabrina would forgive him for this, that people would understand, if he was still left standing at the end. “Andrelamastro, matarastar, fro--”
There were more and more blackened spots in Leanne’s vision, until she couldn’t really see. She might have closed her eyes, if she could control them, but no such luck. Slowly, panic was replaced by peace and lights dancing in front of her as she could still hear Ambrose far, far away. She wondered fleetingly what he was doing, but had no time to wonder anything else. A while after she was truly gone, her body stopped convulsing at last.
Ambrose knew he was too late, but he finished his spell anyway, just in case. Just in case he could ease her pain for a few seconds, just in case he could take her pain away himself before the poison finished its job.
With one hand, he slowly closed her eyes, and then he lowered it so he could hold her, one last time. He sat there with her body cradled in his arms long after breath left her body. He hoped she was at peace, wherever she was.