In that moment, Katniss felt pain in every part of her body. The force of which Thresh had slammed into her had made it feel as if her skelton was trying to leave her skin. She fell to the ground, and Thresh got up. Katniss scrambled away, unsure if anything was broken in her body. Her bow was broken, however, snapping in half. The string had broke, and had actually hit her in the face, she only realized after she felt blood trickle down her face.
Thresh screamed. Loudly. It was a hellish, blood curdling sound, it almost felt like it was increasing the pain in Katniss' body. Breathing heavily, Thresh pulled the arrow out of his arm, almost like it was nothing. It would have seemed like he didn't feel any pain from it, but once again he let out a hellish scream as it began to bleed. He stared at Katniss, breathing heavily. Katniss thought that this was the end of her.
The Capitol sat at the edge of their seats, awaiting what was next, anticipating the next movie..
Thresh looked over the supplies that Katniss had dropped, and noticed something. A piece of bread. A familiar piece of bread. It was from 11. For a moment his head was clear. He was at home. But then it came back to him, he was at the games. He was in them. He needed to win before he even thought of home.
Thresh reached down, grabbing both Katniss and the bread. He held her by the shoulder with one hand, tightly gripped. If he wanted to, he could probably shatter it right now. He held the bread in her face.
"This. Where the fuck." He was breathing so heavily it was hard for him to speak. "Where the fuck did you get this?" He stared at Katniss. Katniss was looking death in the eyes.
Katniss realized she had to answer before he killed her.
"A-a sponsor." She told the truth. It was. "After… after Rue was killed… I was with her, allied… but the boy from District 1 got to her. He killed her… I killed him… I was too late…" Katniss didn't know what to say next, if she even could say anything.
Thresh screamed again, and then actually screamed words. "Fucking privileged assholes!" He shoved Katniss down, staring her in the eyes once again. "I'll fucking kill them all!" He said. He stormed off, leaving Katniss, but not before saying "Just this once I leave you. For the girl. But I will be back." Thresh disappeared in the decreasing daylight.
Katniss sat there terrified. What had just happened. The Capitol sat there in awe. Seneca sat there in horror. Katniss was supposed to die in that moment… or Thresh in the moment before. Whatever was supposed to happen… it was not that.
As the adrenalin left Katniss, she felt the pain. She didn't bother to climb a tree. It would hurt too much, and she knew she would hurt more in the morning. She just lay down. Nothing was broken but her bow. She could fix it… right? She drifted off to sleep while trying to plan on how to fix it.
When she awoke, there was pain everywhere in her body. Her bones ached. Her head hurt, surely she had a concussion. She knew her body was bruised, probably badly too. She got up, slowly, painfully. She slowly got her supplies together. The grooslings she had cooked were crushed at some point during that encounter with Thresh. She ate some anyways. She couldn't waste them. That encounter with Thresh. She replayed it over and over again in her mind. Did that really happen? It did. It would have been on camera too… Prim would have saw that… at least part of it, if she hadn't turned herself away during that moment. She had to wonder what was going on in Thresh's mind, letting her live. Going off to find the careers. Had he gone mad? Did he see the bread and have a moment of clarity? The bread. Was it still here? Katniss looked around her supplies, still there. She ate the rest of it. How different that encounter would have gone had she ate the whole thing before…
The ever fluctuating odds in the Capitol, for Katniss they were going down. Without her bow, she wasn't as much as a threat anymore. She examined it. It was more broken than she thought it was. It had snapped in half, and was cracked in multiple places. The string was snapped too, covered in dried blood. Her blood. From a cut on her face. It came back to her. Yes, the string had snapped, and hit her in the face. Her face was covered with dried blood. She had an open wound on her face. She needed to clean it. She stood on two feet, walking towards the stream, slowly. So much pain, just to do something so simple. Agonizing. She reached the stream, and slowly got herself down on her knees, and splashed her face, wetted her hands scrubbed the dried blood off her face. She cleaned out her wound with the stream. It obviously hurt, but so did everywhere else on her body.
She limped back to her supplies. She thought about what possibly she could do next. She had knives from the District 1 boy. He had a first-aid kit to, she remembered, she could use that on herself, to repair herself as much as possible. The knives would be her only weapon now. Would be. If it weren't for the fact that her supplies had been taken.
Everything was gone. How long was she at the stream? Couldn't have been more than 5 minutes. Someone had been watching her this whole time. They had to have been. There couldn't have been anyone who just happened to wander by, they would have gone looking for her. Someone had been stalking her, waiting for the right moment, not to kill her, but to take her supplies. It could not have been a District 2 tribute, they would have come to find her and kill her. It couldn't have been Thresh, he said, screamed, that he was going to hunt down the District 2 tributes. Peeta… he was injured, he wouldn't be quick enough to take everything and run off. It could only have been the foxfaced girl from 5.
All that was left was the broken bow, and the bloody arrow that Thresh had pulled from himself. Katniss leaned over to pick up the broken bow, stopping for a moment. There was a single strand of hair on it. She picked up the hair. Long. and red. That confirmed it. She had been robbed by the foxfaced girl from 5.
Seneca Crane cheered in his head. A tribute he had been instructed to kill had all her supplies taken. Bless this tribute, the girl from 5. As a gamemaker, he wasn't supposed to be biased towards a tribute, only against them had they done something wrong, but he felt now that he owed the girl from 5 something. He almost wanted her to win now. He certainly would go easier on her in the next few days as the conclusion of the games grew closer.
Finch had watched the girl from 12 for a while now. The fire she had lit had attracted her attention. She watched from afar, waiting, hoping maybe she'd leave some scraps behind for her to eat. Then she had watched the boy from 11 slam into her. Finch covered her eyes. She had avoided seeing death so far, and she would avoid it for as long as possible. But there was no death. There was talk of… an alliance. Not between them, but between the girl from 11 and the girl from 12. And the boy from 11 left. "For the girl" he said. Alliances. How stupid. Such a high chance of being back stabbed. You make yourself a bigger target. You can't travel as fast. And if you both somehow manage to survive, then in the end you have to fight the person you've been allied with. One of you has to die.
The girl from 12 eventually fell asleep, or passed out from pain, Finch wasn't sure which, right on top of her supplies. Finch took a quick nap, waking up before the girl from 12. Sleep had been hard to come by while in the arena, most of her sleep had been short and interrupted by odd noises, more than likely created by the gamemakers to spice things up a little bit, throw her off a bit, but it didn't work. She stayed sharp even through this little sleep deprivation.
Again, Finch watched the girl from 12. She watched her sleep. She watched her get up. She watched her eat, while she had stomach pain. It had been… 3 days? 3 days now since she ate something decent, other than small berries around the arena, which she had noticed were getting increasingly smaller, and fewer patches throughout the arena. Meals had been few and far between for her, and small at best. She had lost quite a bit of weight over the last 11 days they had been in the arena.
Slowly the girl from 12 got up, after seemly being lost in thought, and slowly walked towards the stream. Finch was puzzled, unsure of why. Even more stupidly, the girl from 12 had left her supplies there. Unguarded. When she was out of site, Finch quickly got up and grab the remainder of the food, and the pack the girl from 12 had left. She picked up the bow, but realized it was destroyed, there was no use for it, and put it back down. She looked around quickly, realizing there was something under a pile of leaves and rocks that clearly had been distrubed. Knives, and spearheads. Weapons, she could possibly get a use out of those in the end. She quickly shoved them into the pack and ran off, she quietly slipped back into the forest, and then quickly ran, away from the girl from 12. The girl from 12 was in no condition to chase her, but she needed to move, or else risk death by staying in one spot for too long, which the girl from 12 was. Someone would find her eventually, whether it be the gamemaker's mutts, or another tribute… the boy from 11 did say he would be coming back, after all.
Finch felt she had traveled sufficiently far enough, not just from the girl from 12, but everyone else, too. She had been keeping a map in her head of the arena, and where she last saw each remaining tribute, and how far they possibly had gone. She set down the pack, and began to look through it. There was more food than whatever meat had been wrapped up and crushed. There were more berries, and roots, obviously edible or there would be no point in having them. There were the knives the girl from 12 had hid, possibly belonging to one of the careers, along with the spearheads. She suspected that the knives and spearheads had belonged to the boy from 1, who had been killed by the girl from 12, as Finch had heard from the conversation. A flashlight, not particularly useful unless you want to bring attention to yourself. Two bottles , 1 filled with water. Finch immediately took a drink, she hadn't had much water in the last few days, small amounts from trees, plants and berries. Among the food was also a pack of dried fruits. Finch opened it and half of them, it had been a while since she had anything other than berries, there wasn't much else growing in the arena. There was a water purifier too, that would be very useful.
The last thing in the pack was night vision goggles. Surprising. And, amazing, she was now on level terms with the two from two, at least when it came to the night. Finch laughed. Randomly, out of nowhere. She had felt the need to laugh at every little thing that had happened in the arena. The fire, the explosion, now this. Was it out of happiness? Or was she losing her mind? The very thought of having to question it made her think it was the latter. But at least the rest of her mind was still sharp. She ate a little bit of the crushed mystery meat, too. Obviously it was something from the arena, killed and cooked, a bit burnt actually. That didn't really matter, food is food. Food is food, and Finch had to make it last, so she didn't feast.
Wandering aimlessly. That's what Cato and Clove had been doing. A mental red haze had been impairing them, they wanted justice. To bring death for whoever had blown up the supplies. They didn't know who had blown it up, but that wouldn't matter, they'd find out when the games were over. Well, one of them would, only one of them could win. Both of them thought it would be them, they knew exactly what the other's weaknesses were. But first there was hell to be paid. Everyone else had to die first… although it was still possible for someone else to kill the other. But first they had to find someone, and they hadn't. They hadn't seen anyone for a few days now, other than each other. Thresh must be still deep in his wheat field, but he'll be out eventually. Maybe he even left when he saw his district partner in the sky?
Late in the day, the sun beginning to go. Clove sat down with a childish huff.
"We're not going to find anyone today." She says.
"We're not going to find anyone if we just sit here" Cato replies.
"We're not going to find anyone if I pass out from exhaustion." Clove snaps back.
"Hey, if that happens, I can kill you if you want." Cato says. Clove glares angrily. "Hey, I tease you because I love you" The words 'I love you' had a teasingly sarcastic tone to them. Cato and Clove had been going back and forth about how much they loved each other, as a joke, as an insult to the lovers of district 12. But it was clear that they were not in love, Cato had taken a liking to Glimmer. Her death angered Cato, and it was at the hands of the girl from 12. The tracker jackers. Clove still had nightmares when she slept, the horrors of what was induced by the venom coming back every night. She wondered, did Cato have them too? Glimmer and Marina… what was their brief moments like? These thoughts, why did she have them? Wondering about the torture of others… they were her friends… well, as much as you can be friends when you're supposed to be fighting them to the death.
The lovers would be good as dead if Cato found them. It was surprising that the boy had not died yet, according to Cato he cut him pretty good. At this point, he's probably in a coma, death will come for him eventually.
Clove couldn't help but smile at Cato's mention of 'love'. But she wasn't really sure if the smile was because it was funny.. Or because she had actually fallen in love with him. All this teasing… was it for real? While she was hallucinating, she had various 'dreams' of Cato dying, more than she had seen other careers die. When she finally came to, she hugged him, glad to see him alive. Glimmer and Marina had died. The boy from three had also been stung… he joined them after he said he could re-activate the mines. That went well. Almost everything was fucking gone. Marvel had died chasing down someone, Clove assumed it was the girl from 11. Someone killed him, obviously, it had to be either the boy from 11 or the girl from 12. The girl from 5 couldn't possibly have anything to kill anyone with. She didn't look like a killer either. And a training score of 5… it was amazing she was alive still. But she'd starve eventually, if they didn't find her first.
Eventually, Clove fell asleep, cuddled against Cato, who stayed awake on defense. Again, the nightmares began. Expecting death to come to you, over and over again. Death coming to your loved ones. To your friends, family. It feels so real, the knives digging into your body. Drowning, over and over again, in a lake, in the ocean, in your own blood. The stings, over and over. Feeling yourself get ripped a part. You would have no idea how it feels. But somehow, the venom makes you know. Clove did not want to die, she already felt it. She did not want Cato to die either. But one of them had to.
"Katniss" Peeta called out.
"Katniss" Peeta called out.
"Katniss" Peeta called out. Except he didn't. His lips didn't move. He couldn't move them. Or could he? He wasn't entirely sure. He was too weak. He didn't know if it was only his brain calling out to her or if the words were actually coming out of his mouth. He couldn't get up, get out. He had buried himself, camouflaged himself. Camouflaged himself too well. He had heard another tribute. They didn't find him He wasn't sure how long ago it was, he had been drifting in and out of consciousness. He wished he hadn't buried and hid himself so well. Someone would have surely killed him if they could see him, taking him out of his misery. Death was coming fast though. It had to be. He could hardly think. It hurt. His leg hurt. Where he had been stung hurt. The stings. The last vivid memories he had were the stings, and the nightmares that came after. The cut. That was real, he had seen it, felt it for real, saw it with is own eyes. But he had seen more, shiny, it wasn't real, was it? Countless times he saw the careers come down on him, and attempt to kill him. Bread and cake eating him. Katniss dying before his eyes. Katniss. She was still alive, wasn't she? He had told her to run, he remembered, but he had remembered her dying. Many times… but those memories, were all shiny. He was killed by the careers multiple times too, as far as he remember, and it felt so real. Did any of them survive? Peeta wasn't even sure anymore, who was left. As long as Katniss was okay, he was happy. She could still win. She could make it home alive. If only she'd find him. Just for a kiss.
The nightmares, that still come, maybe. This could still all be hallucinations. And he'd wake up to find that he'd just been under some leaves, too weak to get up. Perfectly fine.
No. He slipped away. He'd never wake up.