Chapter 21
I struggle to stay conscious, to stay here, to stay alive. There's a nagging, burning thought in the back of my mind that Katniss won't care, that she won't bother to look for me, but I can't really believe it. Besides, it's obvious the rule change is for us—the star-crossed lovers from District 12. They wouldn't have made the change if our story wasn't popular in the Capitol, too popular to ignore. Haymitch must be doing a fantastic job of promoting it. My eyes popped open. Haymitch!
I'd forgotten all about our mentor back in the Control Room. I didn't need him while I was with the Careers, so wasn't looking for gifts from sponsors. But for the Gamemakers to make a rule change, we must have sponsors, rich powerful ones. Haymitch could have sent me something for this wound. Why hasn't he all this time? Did he think it would be a waste of a gift, that I'm too far gone already?
My elation deflates. The rule change could be too late. Katniss being my ally doesn't mean I'm not dead. If she finds me, it might only be in time to say goodbye. But hey, that's worth hanging on for. A kiss goodbye from Katniss Everdeen. My whole body's cold and numb, so I can't be sure, but I think I'm smiling.
The cameras must surely be looking for me now. They have to be, there's almost no one left to film. I wonder if they can see me in mud smiling like an idiot. I hope not. I've forgotten about that part of the Games. Maybe not having a clear shot of me will give the audience just that little extra twist of drama.
I spend the rest of the night alert, too afraid and anxious to give into sleep. And I'm a little worried that Katniss might do something reckless. Clove and Cato were plenty motivated to kill us before, but they'll know she's coming for me now, and that I'm weak and wounded. It's the reason I hadn't allied with her before, but now…now the Gamemakers have maneuvered us together and I can't say I don't want it.
Time folds over on itself again and everything starts to go a little hazy. Something's making a racket off to my left, but I can't focus on it. I'm so tired and it's so hard to stay awake. I try to remind myself I need to stay awake, but I can't remember why.
I hear the sound again and I try to ignore it, but it's grating, repeating itself on a loop. It comes to me through the pain that this is the call of a mockingjay. That's nice. Maybe it's the same mockingjay from a few days ago. The song it's picked is strange, though. It almost sounds like my name.
Other sounds come to me, of someone walking. It's not the heavy tread of any of the Careers, but the light footfall of someone used to moving unheard. I only hear it because it's so close.
I crack my eyes open and I see her, all grays and mauves in my feverish sight, stalking along the streambed her bow poised for a strike. "You here to finish me of, sweetheart," I croak.
Her head whips around, looking for the source of my voice, but she still doesn't see me.
"Peeta?" she whispers, still looking around.
She's almost right on top of me, her left foot level with my face. "Well, don't step on me," I say.
She jumps away from me. I laugh and she finally sees me in the cover of mud and leaves, her eyes wide.
"Close your eyes again," she says.
I hear a rustling, and then she's quiet for a long moment. "I guess all those hours decorating cakes paid off," she says. She has to be kneeling by my side because her voice is much closer now.
"Yes, frosting. The final defense of the dying," I say.
"You're not going to die," she says.
"Says who?" I ask.
"Says me," she says, finding my hand among the weeds. "We're on the same team now, you know." There's a hitch in her voice.
I open my eyes. "So, I heard. Nice of you to find what's left of me."
She ignores this, instead pulling out her water bottle and holds it to my lips. I take a small swallow.
"Did Cato cut you?" she asks.
I nod and close my eyes again. "Left leg. Up high."
"Let's get you in the stream, wash you off so I can see what kind of wounds you've got," she says.
"Lean down a minute first," I say. "Need to tell you something."
She leans over me, tucking her hair behind her ears. I put my lips right up again her ear, brushing against the skin as I speak. "Remember, we're madly in love, so it's all right to kiss me anytime you feel like it."
No time like the present to start working on that list of regrets.
She jerks her head back and tries to look outraged, but ends up laughing. "Thanks, I'll keep it in mind."
But instead of getting a kiss, the next twenty minutes are full of screaming agony as Katniss tries to help me to the stream. Three days ago, it would have been nothing for me to walk the couple feet to the stream, but these final days have zapped, leaving me weak and boneless . I hadn't planned on ever leaving this hiding place, so I'd made it fairly permanent and the living plants have grown around me. Katniss pulls and tugs, but I can't move. And the pain. I'm biting my lip hard enough to draw blood, just to distract me from the pain in the rest of my body.
Katniss struggles through this too. She doesn't want to hurt me, but no matter what we try it's going to hurt. I grit my teeth and let her attempt to roll me the rest of the way to the stream. The rocky ground bits into my wounded flesh and we can only make one turn before I'm screaming.
She stops, breathing hard. Instead of getting me to the stream, she starts pouring the water from her half-gallon bottle over me. The stream water isn't as refreshing when it' being dumped on top of you, but it loosens the mud and that feels better.
She does this five times before I can see my skin again. And my bones. The bones of my hands and wrist are prominent under my pale flesh. And I've never seem the blue-green latticework of my veins so clearly through my skin.
Katniss helps me undress, gently pulling my jacket and shirt from my body, cutting away the undershirt caked to my skin. After that, I pull myself up against a boulder while she gently strokes the dirt from my flesh and treats my wounds.
Under normal circumstances this would be the highlight of my life—actually, I'm still kind of enjoying it now—but the dizziness has made a reappearance and I keep going back out.
Katniss takes my clothes away to wash in the stream and I close my eyes. When I open them again, she's in front of me, frowning.
"You're burning up." She shuffles through her bag until she finds a blister pack of pills that reduce fever.
Yes, the joys of actually having supplies.
She must have gotten away from the Cornucopia with some of the best gear for it to have this kind of medicine.
She pops two into my mouth and puts the water bottle to my lips. I swallow them and they immediately try to come back up, but I force the medicine to stay in my empty stomach.
I almost fail when Katniss offers me the leg of some kind of bird a few minutes later. The gamey smell of the meat brings the acidic taste of the pills up into my mouth, but I swallow it back down.
"Peeta, we need to get some food in you," she says.
"It'll just come right back up," I insist.
"If not the groosling, then something else," she counters. She puts the meat away and pulls out what looks like an assortment of mushy chunks.
"What's that?" I say.
She looks down at the food and then back up at me. "They're vegetables," she says in offended tones.
I shake my head. "Katniss, I'm sorry. I'm not going to be able to keep anything down."
"Some fruit, then. Just some dried fruit." She holds out a handful of dried apple rings. I can tell Katniss isn't going to stop until I eat something.
"Okay," I whisper, taking them from her hand.
She looks relieved. "Good."
She watches me until I eat them. They aren't bad—a little tough to chew— but my stomach doesn't reject them.
"Thanks," I say. "I'm much better really. Can I sleep now Katniss?"
"Soon" she promises. "I need to look at your leg first."
Katniss checks my leg. In all the pulling and rolling, the makeshift bandage has disappeared, leaving the cut open to the mud and dirt. The flesh is deeply inflamed, full of pus, and reeks of festering.
Her face turns grim, the color draining from her cheeks until she's almost as pale as I am.
"Pretty awful, huh?" I ask.
She schools her features, but stops to bit the fingernails of her left hand before speaking. "So-so," she says, shrugging. "You should see some of the people they bring my mother from the mines. First thing is to clean it well."
She pours more water over my lower body. After the mud is gone, she treats my minor wounds, the tracker jacker stings and small burns from the fireball attack, but she can't do anything for the cut, only stare.
"Why don't we give it some air and then…." She trails off.
"And then you'll patch it up?" I say. She probably didn't think she was getting herself into this kind of mess when she came looking for me.
"That's right," she says. "In the meantime, you eat these." She hands me more of the dried fruit, this time pear halves, and takes my pants to wash them in the stream and lay them out next to my jacket and shirt to dry.
She then pulls out her small first aid kit and sifts through it several times, but I know there's nothing in there for a wound like this. Maybe if I'd gone back to the Cornucopia in the first hours after Cato cut me, I could have found something that would have prevented the infection, but now, nothing in the arena can treat an injury like this.
We're going to have to experiment some," says Katniss.
She pulls out some more of the leaves she used to treat my tracker jacker stings. I'd been a little skeptical earlier when she chewed the mass of leaves up and smeared them on the tracker jacker lumps, but the relief had been instantaneous, so I let her put another handful of the chewed up leaves into my leg wound.
The pain doesn't go anywhere and pus begins to bubble out, dribbling down my leg in rivulets. It's repulsive, almost as if my leg isn't a part of me, as if I'm watching this happen to someone else.
Katniss stands over me, face blank, struggling to hide her feelings, but she's about as green as she was on the train when we ate all that Capitol food for the first time.
"Katniss," I say and she meets my eyes. And because everything about this situation is so unbelievably nightmarish and horrible, I do the only thing I can think of. I mouth the words. "How about that kiss?"
She bursts out laughing like I'd hoped she would and that unnerving blank look goes out of her face.
"Something wrong?" I say.
"I…I'm no good at this. I'm not my mother. I've no idea what I'm doing and I hate pus," she admits in one quick breath. She groans as she rinses away the pus and leaves. She puts more leaves into the wound and the pus starts back dripping. She lets out another disgusted sound.
I don't know why she should be so disgusted. She hunts, guts, and skins animals on a daily basis.
"How do you hunt?"
"Trust me. Killing things is much easier than this," she says, then pauses. "Although for all I know, I am killing you."
I lean my head back against the boulder. "Can you speed it up a little?"
"No. Shut up and eat your pears," she says.
I'd hoped that she hadn't noticed I didn't eat the fruit. But since the evidence is still in my hand, she couldn't help but see it. I put one of the chewy pieces in my mouth.
For someone who doesn't know what she's doing, she's efficient, cleaning the wound out three times with the leaves. The leg has lost some of that festered smell and the swelling has gone down.
"What next, Dr. Everdeen?" I say.
"Maybe I'll put some of the burn ointment on it," she says. "I think it helps with infection anyway. And wrap it up?"
I doze as she wraps up the wound in the bandage from the first aid kit.
I wake a few minutes later when she hits me with a small backpack.
"Here, cover yourself with this and I'll wash your shorts," she says.
"Oh, I don't care if you see me," I say.
"You're just like the rest of my family. I care, all right?" She's blushing and all flustered when she turns away from me and holds her hand behind her for the shorts.
Laughing, I pull the shorts off. At every tug, the white-hot pain in my leg flares to life, but I feel better than I have since the fight with Cato. I throw the shorts over her head and they land in the stream with a splash.
She huffs and wades out to beat them between two rocks.
"You know, you're kind of squeamish for such a lethal person," I say. "I wish I'd let you give Haymitch a shower after all."
I can't see her expression because she's still facing the other way, but I think I see her give a little shiver.
"What's he sent you so far?"
"Not a thing," I say before realizing she said "so far." Why would she think I'd gotten anything, unless she already has? "Why, did you get something?"
"Burn medicine," she says. "Oh, and some bread."
My eyes go to her cut off pant leg and the mostly healed burn on her calf. It looks like it was bad, but still nowhere near as bad as the gash on my thigh.
But Haymitch sent her medicine.
It's what I would have wanted Haymitch to do anyway, help Katniss, but it still hurts that he watched me suffer so long, dying slowly in the mud and did nothing.
"I always knew you were his favorite," I say.
"Please, he can't stand being in the same room with me," she says.
"Because you're just alike," I mutter.
She doesn't answer me and I don't say anything else. I go back to dozing until she shakes me awake.
"Peeta, we've got to go now," she says.
"Go?" I say vaguely. That wasn't part of the plan and no one's been this way in days. "Go where?"
"Away from here. Downstream maybe. Somewhere we can hide you until you're stronger."
She hands me my clothes back and helps me pull them on. I'm not sure why she feels it's so urgent now, after all this time, but her instincts have got to be better than mine.
She yanks me to my feet and I remember why I chose to lie in a mud puddle for three days. She pulls harder.
"Come on. You can do this," she says.
So I do it. With me leaning against her, we make it about fifty yards downstream before the world starts to dim and I have to stop. Katniss sits me down on the banks of the stream, rubbing my back as I recover. I breathe in and out, pushing air through my gritted teeth.
When I'm able to stand again, Katniss points out a small cave some twenty yards above the stream. I want to tell her I don't think I can climb twenty feet let alone twenty yards, but she's done so much for me today that she didn't have to, anyone else would have left after seeing my injury. I can't disappoint her.
Somehow, with a lot of dragging and leaning, we make it to the cave. Katniss covers the floor with a layer of pine needles she collected on the way up, then unrolls her sleeping bag and tucks me into it. It's big enough for two, but she insists on trying to make a blind to cover the entrance to the cave. I watch while she works.
Any other night in the arena, Katniss would be safely up a tree by now; hidden where Cato and Clove couldn't reach her even if they tried. Now she's anchored to me and I've done the one thing I promised myself I wouldn't do—I've put her in danger. Haymitch must hate me for messing up his best chance at a victor.
And I'm getting nothing but weaker. I haven't told Katniss, but the cut on my leg has swelled up again. I can feel it pressing again the tighten bandage.
She's pulling the vines down now, frustrated that they're not doing what she wants.
"Katniss," I say. She throws the vines down and comes over to me. She reaches out to brush the hair out of my eyes.
"Thanks for finding me," I say.
"You would have found me if you could," she says. Her hand pauses on my forehead, checking my temperature I think.
"Yes. Look, if I don't make it back—"
"Don't talk like that. I didn't drain all that pus for nothing," she demands.
"I know. But just in case I don't—"
"No, Peeta, I don't even want to discuss it."
She puts her fingers over my lips, but I push them aside. "But I—"
Before I can say another word, she leans forward and kisses me. It's just a quick press of her lips against mine, but it's enough to trap the words in my throat. She pulls away from me and starts fiddling with the edges of the sleeping bag.
"You're not going to die. I forbid it. All right?" she says.
"All right," I whisper and then she's walking out the entrance of the cave.