A/N: Hey guys, thank you all for your wonderful reviews! Here's chapter two for you all! ^_^

Disclaimer: I don't own The Hunger Games.

Chapter Two

"Hold Glimmer's bucket for me dear," Nurse Trinket said, handing Katniss the bin in which Glimmer had just hurled in. She pulled a face, holding the bucket out from her body. While the nurse fixed up the girl's duvet, Katniss resisted the urge to pinch her nose to ward off the smell emnating from the bucket.

"Can the tree hugger not handle a bucket of vomit?" Clove asked from her bed.

Katniss scowled. "Compared to the normal shit I have to scrape through, this is nothing," she said indignantly. Nurse Trinket took the bucket back and went off to clean it out and sterile it.

Clove laughed. "Bring it back quick Effie, Marvel's looking a little green!" Alarmed, Katniss whipped around to look at Marvel, only to find him looking fine and watching the old telly programme that seemed to play on repeat in the ward 24/7. Clove laughed harder at her reaction. "Handled worse? Sure, whatever."

Deciding to ignore the girl's irritating teasing, Katniss gestured to the t.v. "What is this anyway?" she asked Marvel.

"Cheers," he answered.

"It can't be recent, the screen's all grainy," she replied.

"Yeah, it's ancient," Glimmer said. She was sitting forward in her bed, bracing herself against the mattress. She still looked serverely ill after throwing up but there was no trace of it in her voice. "But he loves it."

"It's classic stuff!" Marvel protested.

Cato snorted, not even looking up from his book. "Yeah, classic bullshit."

"Says the bloke reading Harry Potter," Marvel threw back.

Nurse Trinket popped her head around the door. "Stop fighting children. We don't want to make a bad impression to Katniss," she scolded before disappearing again. Clove rolled her eyes and flipped off the spot where Nurse Trinket once stood.

"'Stop fighting children,'" she mimicked. Glimmer and Marvel snickered in amusement. Cato rolled his eyes and continued reading. Katniss squinted at the front cover and raised her eyebrows.

"Deathly Hallows," she said. "Last book, right?"

Quirking an eyebrow, Cato peered over his book. "Yeah," he said simply.

"I've read that," Katniss replied, trying to sound friendly (something she was never very good at).

"Ay, ay, keep quiet or he'll wring your neck in," Clove warned. "He doesn't like spoilers."

Katniss looked around the ward curiously, only just noticing that everyone had their own little thing to do. Clove had her video game, Cato had his books, Marvel had the t.v and Glimmer was sewing diamonds onto her pyjamas. Across the ward, Rue was still sleeping and Finch was doing a crossword. Beside Finch the bed was . . . empty.

Before she could really stop and think about it, Katniss found herself asking, "Where's the blond kid?"

Clove raised her eyebrows. "You mean Peeta, right?"

"Um, yeah," Katniss said hesitantly. "Him."

Clove looked down, her face grave. "Well, you know. Cancer ward . . . no-one's life is set in stone, right?" she said. Katniss' eyes widened in horror. Was she saying that Peeta was . . . dead? How could that possibly be right? She only just saw him yesterday! He couldn't be dead already, not being the only person who'd shown the tiniest bits of kindness towards her?

"What the hell are you talking about Clove?" Glimmer demanded. "He's getting his leg checked over!"

Clove burst out laughing and Katniss felt her veins flaming with rage. "You actually thought he was dead! Did you see her face?! Oh my god, that's hilarious!"

"That's not funny," Katniss said stiffly, feeling nothing but embarrassment. How could she have been so naive!

"You're a sick woman Jettison," Marvel muttered.

"Oh my god!" Clove was still laughing, curling up in her bed and cackling like a witch. Katniss wanted to slap the girl for being so horrible. Who joked about that sort of thing?! "Oh, I'm going to have a lot of fun with you girl, you stick around. It's not everyday someone believes my death jokes!" Katniss was disgusted. So Clove joked around about someone else's death like that on a regular basis?

A cool hand touched her arm and she turned around to find Glimmer smiling at her. "It's okay, she's the only one who finds that funny. He's not dead, I swear."

Building her protective walls back up again after having them knocked down by Clove's sadistic joke, Katniss scowled. "Like I'd have cared. I'm just here for the community service."

Glimmer's face fell, her eyebrows furrowing together into a small frown. "Judging by the look on your face, I'd have said otherwise."

Katniss opened her mouth to reply when Clove butt in. "She was shell shocked! All the colour had gone from her face! She looked like a damn ghost!"

"Oh do shut up Clove," Marvel said. "Just because you're a Cancer paitent, doesn't mean you can take everything out on those who don't have it. I mean, jesus, what happens if Peeta does die someday? He's relapsed enough! You won't be laughing then!"

Glimmer climbed out of her bed and rummanged inside her drawer. Katniss watched with a frown as she produced a small block of wood from the middle drawer. She walked around her bed and hobbled over to Clove's, shoving the block of wood under her nose. "Touch it and say that Peeta is not dead," she ordered.

Rolling her eyes, Clove slapped her hand onto the wood. "Peeta is not dead," she monotoned.

"Wait, what's that about?" Katniss asked while Glimmer walked back around to her bed.

"It's what we do. If anyone jokes, talks or hints at death for any of us, we touch the wood and say that they're not going to die and/are not dead," Marvel explained. "Clove just said that Peeta was dead, therefore she must touch the block and say that he is not. It's not that we believe in supersition, but it's not worth the risk."

Katniss bit her lip and shifted her weight. "Not worth what risk?"

A silence fell across the ward, the only sound to be heard being the occasional turning of the pages of Cato's book and the scribbling of Finch's pen scratching on her crossword. Katniss could practically feel herself suffocating in the awkward air that hung around the paitents. Had she unintentionally struck a nerve?

"The last thing we said to Thresh was 'good luck with the colonoscopy'," Marvel said quietly.

Alarmed, Katniss frowned. "What? Why?" she asked.

"It was a joke we had amongst each other," Clove explained with a careless shrug. "We were just messing around. Thresh knew we were messing around."

"He even laughed," Glimmer added.

"But he never came back."

Katniss looked at her feet, feeling almost ashamed. For what though, she wasn't sure. "Oh," she frowned. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," Marvel said. "I mean, it was two months ago . . ."

"The only reason I made a joke was because I know for sure Peeta isn't going to die," Clove explained. "He's just getting a check up on his leg."

Katniss brushed her hair behind her ears and looked back up at Clove. "What's wrong with his leg?" she asked.

Clove shrugged. "First bout of cancer was in his bone marrow," she answered. "He had to get a leg amputated. The amputation worked, he made dust of this place for a good year. Must have been nice, to be free for a while . . ."

"And all the more harder to be forced back," Marvel muttered. Clove glared at him but he shrugged. "What? It's true. Must be hard being forced back to this hell hole. Then again, we're all used to it. Relapse is as common as rocks around here."

Katniss couldn't believe what she was hearing. How could they talk so easily about this? As if relapsing and cancer and amputations were part of everyday life and were just something to be got on with. But then . . . to them, maybe it was. She looked at the door and willed Nurse Trinket to return, to save her from the leukaemia paitents who were making everything so much harder and so much more uncomfortable.

Not expecting the door to open as soon as she made the wish for Nurse Trinket to return, Katniss jumped as someone came through. She was relieved-thinking it was Nurse Trinket-only to tense back up again as someone else came through.

Peeta bumped the door open with his hip, hobbling into the ward with a cane to aid him as he walked. Katniss felt a twitch of something she could only describe as bashfulness and a slight tint of relief to see him again. Same hair, same eyes, same pyjamas, same nightgown. He was all in one piece and he wasn't dead at all.

"Peeta! You're back, finally!" Glimmer said, her voice flooded with relief. It was as if the girl had believed that he had actually died while they had been talking.

"Clove scared the crap out of tree hugger by saying you'd bit the dust," Marvel said.

Peeta looked at Katniss, blinking in surprise. Katniss looked away, unable to look him straight in those bright blue eyes, heat flooding to her cheeks in embarrassment. "She didn't scare me," she said. "I knew you were fine." She expected him to laugh, or at least be angry at the fact that someone was making jokes about his death.

"Well, that's good, because I am fine," Peeta simply said. Katniss looked back up at him in surprise, her eyebrows shooting to her hairline. "I mean, a bit sore but nothing can be done about that. No rest for the wicked, right?"

Clove snorted. "No rest for the wicked," she parroted. "Well gee Peet, you must be a damn saint the amount of time you sleep."

Peeta grinned and winked at her, wincing and quickly sitting down on his bed. Katniss found it difficult not to stare at his legs, wondering which one was the one that had to be amputated. It was horrible to stare and she knew it, but there was something that kept dragging her eyes towards it whenever she tried to look away.

To keep her mind distracted, she busied herself with grabbing a brush that was propped up against the wall and brushing up the floor. Everyone went back to their small hobbies; Clove reassuming her video game, Cato continuing to read-not that he had contributed to the previous conversation that much anyway-Marvel once again getting absorbed into the t.v show and Glimmer sewing more diamonds.

As she was brushing, she paused at Rue's bed. She looked so young . . . was her cancer terminal or did she still have a shot at curing this thing? Katniss felt a wrench in her gut and sighed, shaking her head and continuing to brush up.

Her mind unoccupied once more, Katniss internally swore as her eyes skittered back towards Peeta. Damn it, the kid was like a damn lighthouse. Everytime she turned her back, it felt like he was watching her. Which was ridiculous because when she turned back, he was busy drawing in his sketchpad, not looking at her at all. She had to stop looking at him or he'd catch her at any minute and then wonder for the next two years why the tree hugger kept staring at him.

"Clove told you about my leg didn't she?"

"What?" Katniss exclaimed, alarmed at being snapped out of her thoughts. Peeta was looking at her-when at that happened?-with his sketchpad sitting idly in his lap. He had an eyebrow quirked at her and had the faintest of smiles on his lips. Hold on, why was she even looking at his lips? Katniss shook her head.

"You can't stop glancing at me ever since I got back from the check-up. Either I have become so stunningly attractive since the last time you saw me that you can't stop looking at me-" Clove snorted from the other side of the room-"or the snorter over there has told you about my leg."

Katniss winced, ashamed at being caught. "Uh . . ."

"It's okay, you know. I don't mind," Peeta said.

"Which one is it?" Katniss blurted out before she could stop herself.

Peeta grinned. "Left," he answered.

"Is-is-is it like a . . . fake . . . one?" Katniss asked carefully.

He nodded. "Yes. Prosthetic. Well, I say prosthetic, it's more metal than prosthetic."

Katniss tried not to pull a face. "So you can take it off and stuff?" she asked.

"Oh yeah," Clove intercepted. "Grossiest thing you'll ever witness."

Glimmer gasped dramatically. "You hush up Clove!" she said. "That's horrible! How would you like it if you had an artifical limb and he kept mocking you about it?"

Peeta chuckled. "It's okay Glim," he said. "It grosses me out too."

"Well, if it grosses you out then there's no hope for tree hugger," Clove said. Katniss glanced at Clove, trying her hardest not to scowl. "Wait till' curfew nature fucker, you'll see it all then. Effie always tries to help but Peeta never lets her because he has to learn to'do it himself'. The stump is awesome."

This time, Katniss did pull a face. "Stump?" she asked slowly.

"It's okay, you don't have to sit and stare like everyone else," Peeta said. "Seriously guys, the way you all crowd around I think Effie is starting to think I'm dealing drugs or something."

"Or even worse, dealing rated R movies," Marvel muttered. Everyone laughed and Katniss felt like she was missing out on something. Well, it was only her second day, she probably was missing out on something.

Deciding to swiftly change the subject, Katniss stepped closer to Peeta's bed and peered at his sketchbook. "What'cha drawing?" she asked.

"Um, nothing," Peeta replied, quickly shutting his pad. Katniss stepped back, startled. "Uh, sorry, it's just . . . it was nothing." He looked flustered and Katniss internally cursed. She could never find the right things to say, she'd always manage to strike a damn nerve. This was why Gale was her only friend!

"Ha! I get it!" Clove suddenly said. "Somebody's got a crush on tree hugger!"

Peeta scowled at Clove and quickly stuck his sketchpad under his pillow. "Don't you have a level to clear?" he asked dryly.

"Just did it," Clove said, waving her game console in her hand. "I'm more invested in the star-crossed lovers of the cancer ward!"

"What?!" Katniss exclaimed.

"Don't you have anything better to do than make other people's lives miserable?" Glimmer asked.

Clove shrugged. "It's my job."

"I'm going to sleep," Peeta muttered, turning over on his side and throwing his quilt over his head. Katniss stared at his resting form with a frown, wondering what just happened. He was sleeping within minutes, snoring gently in a way that made Katniss smile. She fought it back though, keeping the indifferent mask on her face.

"No rest for the wicked?" Clove scoffed. "Pure damn saint."

Katniss could already tell that this was going to be two very long years.

A/N: Please R&R with your thoughts? Thanks! ^_^