Chapter Text
They passed around their remaining water before all sitting down on the beach to watch the broadcast of who'd been lost that day.
Tendou, they knew. Kageyama. But most of the other faces were largely unfamiliar. People Kenma had rarely paid much attention to during training. He was shocked to see that Yachi had made it through the first day, as had Yamaguchi and Tsukishima. But so had the other five careers. That would prove to be an issue, he figured.
“We should get some sleep,” Akaashi said after it finished. “Take turns keeping watch.”
“Agreed,” Bokuto hummed, already stretching out in the sand and tucking his arms behind his head.
“I'll take first,” Akaashi offered, and something about it prickled Kenma’s skin.
“You seem eager. Aren't you tired?” Kenma asked.
“One of us has to.” Akaashi’s eyes narrowed. “What are you insinuating, little kitty cat?”
Anger simmered beneath Kenma’s skin. He didn't like Akaashi poking fun by using Kuroo’s nickname against him. He also didn't like the accusation that he was insinuating something, even though he was.
“Nothing,” he replied. “I just think maybe we should have two guards.”
Akaashi’s lips pulled up into a scary smile. “You think I'm going to slit your throat in your sleep, kitty cat?”
“Hey, everybody calm down.” Kuroo stepped between them. “No one is saying that, but maybe Kenma is right. Let’s do two guards.”
“Fine,” Akaashi relented. “From different districts at all times, if that’ll ease your mind even more. Does that sound alright, your highness?”
Kenma rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
“I'll take first watch with him,” Kuroo offered.
“You sure?” Kenma asked, turning away from Akaashi, who'd already started to settle down with his eyes towards the forest.
Kuroo kissed Kenma’s forehead and patted his belly. “Yeah, kitten. I got it. You should get some sleep.”
Kenma, Shouyou, and Bokuto all settled down in the sand, while Kuroo and Akaashi geared in for a long night. They decided they'd switch after a few hours, but Kenma knew they’d all wake up exhausted the next day.
Faintly, Kenma could hear Shouyou crying just a few feet away. The sound of that combined with waves crashing on the shore lulled him into a fitful sleep.
***
Kenma was startled awake by a loud cracking sound. He sat bolt upright, head automatically swiveling around and hand reaching for the axe that sat in the sand next to him.
“What the fuck was—” Bokuto sleepily mumbled from the spot next to Kenma, but before he could finish his question, another loud crack rang out. This time, Kenma saw what it was.
Lightning.
The sky above them had grown cloudy and starless, like before a rainstorm, but no droplets fell. Instead, lightning was coming down from the clouds right over the cornucopia, striking the tallest tree in the center over and over again.
Kenma cocked his head to the side, watching.
“Well, that’s fucking weird,” Bokuto said, then laid back down in the sand and promptly started snoring again.
Kenma locked eyes with Kuroo, then pulled himself up to standing and headed over to where he sat with Akaashi.
“Hey,” Kuroo said, reaching out and taking Kenma’s hand to give it a quick squeeze. “You should go back to sleep.”
“How long have we been out for?”
“A few hours,” Akaashi replied. “My guess is that it’s around midnight.”
“Then it’s time to switch.”
“It’s fine.” Kuroo waved him off. “I’ll take the watch for you.”
Kenma felt his eyebrows draw together and his lips turned down into a frown. “We’re not doing that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m perfectly capable of taking a shift on watch.”
“Kitten—”
“Let’s get something straight.” Kenma dropped down to his knees right in front of Kuroo. “I am pregnant. That does not mean you have to treat me like I’m going to fall apart at any second. I’m going to pull my fucking weight here. Got it?”
Kuroo bit down on his bottom lip. For a moment, Kenma thought he would argue, but finally, he said, “Okay. I’ll go wake Hinata. The two of you can take the next few hours. But if you start getting tired, you wake me up, alright?”
“Fine.”
Kuroo got up and headed over to where Shouyou was snoozing. Kenma turned back to Akaashi, who was still looking at the lightning with a thoughtful look on his face.
“Interesting,” he said quietly.
“Interesting?” Kenma echoed.
Akaashi nodded. “Interesting.”
Then he stood and walked over to Bokuto, lying down next to him to get some sleep himself. Shouyou joined Kenma, rubbing at his eyes, which were red-rimmed and swollen.
The lightning continued for about thirty minutes more. Kenma didn’t find it interesting himself. Not exactly. But the fact that Akaashi thought it was interesting?
That interested Kenma.
***
“First things first,” Akaashi said the next morning, “we need to find more water. It's hot enough that that's going to have to be priority one at all times.”
“We found a stream a bit back,” Shouyou said. “We can take you there.”
Their group took off back the way Kenma and Shouyou had come, weapons clutched in their hands. Kuroo and Bokuto had both managed to secure swords for themselves, Kenma had his axe, and Shouyou had his knives. Akaashi had nothing besides a strange coil of wire that Kenma had no clue what he planned to do with, but had dutifully stored in his backpack when Akaashi had asked.
The journey back to the stream wasn't as long or strenuous in the early morning cool air as it had been the day before, but when they arrived there, they found it empty and dried up.
“There was water here yesterday,” Kenma said with disbelief. “Just yesterday.”
“They're probably moving around the sources day to day,” Akaashi guessed. “To make it harder for all of us to stay hydrated.”
It was a good theory, although Kenma hoped it was wrong. If they had to track down a new water source every day, they’d have to keep moving around. That seemed like a good way to walk into a trap of mutts or careers.
“We'll have to split up,” Akaashi said. “Spread out to find it faster.”
“I want to go with Kenma this time,” Kuroo said right away.
“Uh uh uh.” Akaashi smiled again. “I think guard rules should apply to splitting up, as well.”
“Why?” Kenma sputtered.
“I just think it's safer for everyone.”
It took a moment before Kenma realized why Akaashi was suggesting this. If two tributes from the same district were left alone, they could scheme. Plot against the rest of the alliance. If that situation wasn't facilitated, they all could have more peace of mind that no one was conspiring.
“Fine,” he bit out through his teeth.
“Excellent. Kuroo, you'll come with Hinata and I. Kenma, you can go with Bokuto. Everyone happy?”
Shouyou shouted out an enthusiastic “Yes!” while Kuroo and Kenma reluctantly agreed.
Vaguely, he was worried that Bokuto—happy, silly-seeming Bokuto—was going to get him alone and try to kill him. But it was early for their alliance to break, and Kenma was armed. If Bokuto or Akaashi wanted him dead, they never would have gotten him the axe. Or so he hoped.
“Let's each look for about an hour, but if you find something, fill your canteen and head back to the beach,” Akaashi instructed, and then they went their separate ways.
They walked in silence for a couple of minutes, but eventually, Bokuto let out a whistle.
“So,” he said. “Are you really pregnant?”
Kenma turned to look at him, eyebrows drawn together. “Yes, I’m really pregnant.”
“Huh.” He shrugged. “I thought maybe Kuroo was just bullshitting out there for sympathy points.”
He was, Kenma thought. He just bullshitted a little too close to the truth.
“Yeah, well. He wasn’t.”
There was another stretch of silence, but then Bokuto said, “You guys aren’t mated though, right? There’s no claiming bite on your neck.”
Kenma’s fingers instinctively shot up to run over his scent gland. “No,” he replied. “We were waiting until we aged out of the reaping.”
This time, when Boktuo started to say, “Do you—” Kenma interrupted.
“Do we have to talk? Can we just look in silence, please?”
Bokuto let out another low whistle. “Okay, Mr. Hormones.”
The comment made blood rise in Kenma’s cheeks, but he couldn’t protest it. Boktuo was right. His hormones were making him even more irritable than normal, and maybe it wasn’t fair to take that out on Bokuto. Even if he didn’t owe him anything.
Bokuto obliged, though, and kept quiet while they walked, eyes peeled for any kind of water source. But they found nothing as the minutes ticked forward, inching closer to Akaashi’s one hour time limit. Soon, they’d have to turn back for the beach empty handed.
“Fuck, why’d they have to make this so hard?” Bokuto complained.
“It’s the fucking Hunger Games,” Kenma grumbled. “Not a walk in the park.”
“Is it even safe for you to be trekking around like this in this heat? Isn’t it bad for the baby or something?”
It probably was, but it also didn’t matter. They needed water if they wanted to stay alive another day.
“Maybe we should go back,” Kenma said, pausing to wipe sweat from his forehead. “It must have been almost an hour by now.”
“Yeah, that’s a good—”
“KENMA!”
Kenma’s head snapped around at the sound of the shout of his name. It was followed by a pained, high-pitched scream, and then another desperate, terrified, “Kenma!”
“Kuro?” he shouted back, his heart jumping into his throat.
It was definitely Kuroo. Something was wrong with Kuroo. Kuroo was yelling for him. Kuroo needed his help.
Another shout to his right, and Kenma took off running. He heard Bokuto behind him, calling his name, but he didn’t stop, just kept going, trying to follow Kuroo’s voice.
“Kenma!” Kuroo yelled. “Kenma, help me, please!”
The scream seemed to be coming from all around.
“Where are you?” Kenma yelled back. “Kuro, where are you?”
He looked up, eyes instantly locking onto the birds perched in the trees above him.
Jabberjays.
He’d never seen one in person, but that was the only thing it could be.
For a moment, he was relieved. But the relief melted away just as fast as it arrived. Jabberjays copied. If they had audio of Kuroo shouting like that to copy, it meant Kuroo had in fact been shouting like that. They’d only been separated an hour, but that was long enough for a million things to have happened to him.
More screams started up, these ones different, but equally familiar. His mother and father. Kuroo’s parents and siblings. His friends, Yaku and Lev. All screaming and crying and pleading, calling Kenma’s name all around him.
Finally, Bokuto burst out behind him. “Kenma, what the—”
A new shout echoed out, this one calling Bokuto’s name. It was Akaashi.
“Keiji?” Bokuto yelled back. “Keiji, where are—”
“It’s not him!” Kenma grabbed onto his shoulders and shook him. “It’s jabberjays!”
Bokuto’s eyes widened as the shouting around them grew in volume. “But that means…”
“There hasn’t been a cannon!” Kenma yelled, this time having to raise his voice to be heard. “That means they’re not dead. At least not yet.”
“Let’s go,” Bokuto said. “Let’s get away from these fucking birds and find the others.”
Bokuto and Kenma took off through the trees, hopefully in the direction of the beach, but they were all turned around. It was impossible to focus with the jabberjays screaming in their ears and dive-bombing around them. They were following them, more and more gathering around them as they ran. The noise was overwhelming, and as he picked out more and more voices, more people he loved begging for his help, Kenma’s knees grew weak.
One more yell, this one even more distinct than the others rang through his ears:
A baby screaming.
Kenma knew logically that it wasn’t his baby, but he hated to imagine what they’d done to that other baby to get it to make those awful noises. And even if he knew it wasn’t his own, the feelings it elicited out of him were frighteningly similar.
Unable to take it any longer, Kenma collapsed to his knees, slamming his hands over his ears. It muffled the noise, but not enough. The screaming continued. The begging. The crying. They were dying. They were all dying. All of his friends and his family and his mate. And his baby. His baby was dying. It was going to die. It was going to—
A scream ripped out of Kenma’s throat, tears streaming down his face. He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing tighter on his ears.
“STOP!” he shouted. “STOP STOP STOP STOP—”
***
Kenma was still rocking back and forth, hands covering his ears, and lips quietly muttering out, “Stop stop stop stop stop,” when hands suddenly came down on his shoulders.
“It’s okay,” a fuzzy voice said. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
Slowly, Kenma peeled open his eyes, which were sticky with tears. Crouched in front of him was Kuroo, hands rubbing over Kenma’s tense arms. Gently, he pulled Kenma’s hands from his ears and brought them down to rest in his lap.
“You were screaming,” Kenma rasped out. His voice was nearly gone. “You were screaming. They were all screaming. The baby was screaming.”
“I know. I know, but it wasn’t real,” Kuroo said. “It was just the birds.”
“But they copy. They copy. They had to get those sounds from somewhere. You had to have been—”
“I wasn’t,” Kuroo interrupted him. “It must have been fabricated by the Gamemakers. It wasn’t real, kitten. None of it was.”
Kenma still didn’t feel convinced, even as he stared at the living proof in front of him. If Kuroo hadn’t actually been screaming like that for the Gamemakers to record and feed back to their jabberjays, it all must have been fake. No one had touched his family or friends. Nobody had touched that baby.
Slowly, Kuroo pulled Kenma forward and into his arms. He squeezed him tight.
“How’d you find us?” Kenma asked, his face pressed against Kuroo’s shoulder.
“We heard the birds, but they stopped and flew away when we got close enough. They must have been targeted at you and Bokuto specifically.”
Kenma picked his head up enough to catch sight of Bokuto, who looked just as shell-shocked as Kenma did. Akaashi was in front of him, waving a hand in front of his blank face.
“Are you—” Akaashi started, but Bokuto interrupted him.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” He sounded unconvincing.
Kenma had been too focused on the voices of all of his loved ones to notice the extraneous ones. The ones that must have been Bokuto’s family and friends.
“Here.” Kuroo helped Kenma up to standing, supporting him so he didn’t keel over again on his still-weak legs. “We found a water source a bit ways back. Let’s go get you something to drink.”
Akaashi helped Bokuto to his feet as well, and then their group headed off towards this new water source. Shouyou led the way, since he seemed the least perturbed by the whole jabberjay situation. Kuroo never once let go of Kenma’s hand, and Kenma caught Akaashi shooting concerned look after concerned look at Bokuto.
Kenma had thought their relationship was purely transactional—allies and district partners, nothing else—but he was beginning to suspect otherwise. The look of terror on Bokuto’s face when he heard Akaashi shouting for him, and the way he’d desperately called Akaashi Keiji betrayed his true feelings. Akaashi’s worry over him just drove the point home.
A vacant part of Kenma filed the information away for later. He knew that Akaashi was smart enough to use Kenma and Kuroo’s relationship against each other if he had the chance. Maybe Kenma could use his and Bokuto’s relationship as ammunition also.
Finally, Shouyou paused, hands on his hips as he peered at the ground. At another empty riverbed.
“It was just here! Just a few minutes ago!” he said.
Akaashi dropped to his knees in front of the riverbed. He placed his hand down on the quickly-drying mud. “I was wrong. They must be moving the sources every time you find one. They’ll never be in the same place twice.”
“So we can’t ever return to the same water source?” Kenma asked with disbelief.
“It appears not.” Akaashi stood up.
“What if we just found one and camped out there?” Bokuto asked.
“We could try,” Akaashi replied. “But my guess is that it would still drain after we drank from it. Otherwise that would be too easy of a loophole.”
Kenma restrained a groan. It was bad enough when they thought they’d have to find a new water source every day, but every time they needed a drink? How were they ever to survive if they had to constantly be searching for water?
The only plus side of this particular trick of the arena was that it must have applied to everyone, which meant all the tributes would be struggling for water. This would most likely take up the vast majority of everybody’s time. It was more likely they’d die of thirst, but possibly less likely they’d be killed by another tribute, if they were all kept busy trying to track down water.
“Here.” Kuroo helped Kenma sit down on a particularly large fallen tree branch. “Akaashi, where’s the canteen?”
Akaashi produced the canteen from his backpack, passing it to Kuroo, who screwed open the lid before handing it to Kenma. Kenma took a sip. It burnt his raw throat going down, but he forced himself to take another anyway.
“Don’t drink too much,” Akaashi instructed. “We’ve got to make that last between the five of us until we find another source.”
Kuroo shot him a dirty look. “He’s drinking for two.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t sign on to be in an alliance with his unborn baby.”
“It’s fine.” Kenma wiped his lips and passed the canteen back to Kuroo. “I’m fine.”
Kuroo dropped down to crouch in front of him. “Kitten, you have to be careful. This is all putting a lot of stress on your body, which can’t be good for the baby, and we need to—”
“I said I’m fine, Kuro,” he snapped, standing up. Kuroo looked hurt, but there was no way for Kenma to relieve his worries. There was no way Kenma could avoid putting stress on his body in this arena, so they would just have to live with it. If it made him lose the baby, it made him lose the baby.
Just the thought made Kenma’s hands migrate to his stomach.
Please don’t let me lose the baby, he thought suddenly.
He realized all at once that despite being quite accepting of his own imminent death (and inevitably his baby’s as well), Kenma desperately didn’t want to lose the baby before his own demise. He did not want to have a miscarriage. Perhaps that was selfish and pedantic of him, but he didn’t want to lose the baby before losing himself. He wasn’t sure he could handle it.
Shouyou, Akaashi, and Kuroo had all drank some from the river before filling the canteen, so they let Kenma and Boktuo drink about a third of the canteen before heading back to the beach. They’d save the rest for the evening, even though it wouldn’t really be enough for all of them. They’d set out again to look the next morning, this time all together, since splitting up was clearly no longer an option.
As they settled in to sleep that night, Kuroo offered to take the first watch again so Kenma could get some sleep right away. It was a kind thought, and a kind sentiment, but it turned out it didn’t matter. Kenma didn’t sleep. He just laid there, hour after hour, playing back the screaming voices of everyone he’d ever loved.