When Cato wakes , the first thing he sees is mountains.
In the darkness, two pile, snow-covered peaks twist skywards, looking jagged and dangerous and distant. From the precipice of either, it's quite a drop. The sleet hasn't ceased, and in the near-blackness of the eclipse he can just see stark pinpricks of white that come fingering for his face, shuddering the night icy with snow. Something pains him, and in the staggered onslaught of thought he manages to blink, and tries to lean forward, but pain freezes his body.
In the cold, he can feel something horribly lukewarm against his side, and his hands are crisp ad sticky, as if coated with something. Long, black vines are on his skin, from a small pinprick on the tip of his finger. Blood poisoning? Cato lifts a hand to get a better look at the injury, and then realises that half of his arm is coated in blood. He lifts the other hand, which is crimson to the point of being dipped in blood, too. It's dried to some degree, and a little bit more crystallised. Nervously, he looks down at his side where his arms were curled.
"Jesus Christ-" He gets out, in suddenly laboured breaths, leaning back against the seat he's sat in. He couldn't say how, but Cato has ended up sitting in one of the skeletal train carriages, resting upright on the seat, bleeding out his life. A gash runs down the side of his ribs and ends, going in deep, in his side. "That's my blood." He says, confused. "Oh, Christ, that's a lot of my blood…"
In a moment of panic, he goes to get up, one hand nursing the worst part of the injury. There's a small, silver parachute on the seat beside him, and he figures to go for it. The only strange thing is that it rests on the back of the chair, and not the seat. Lightheaded from shock, and loss of blood, he rights himself and moves forward.
The rickety train seat gives a creak. And then it snaps from his hinges.
It falls, alarmingly, backwards, and keeps on falling. Cato crashes to the train floor and realises in a moment why he feels so disorientated. The train isn't horizontal. It's vertical. It's hanging over the cliff's edge.
And now he's sliding down the train floor, scrambling and grasping for precious life, aware that eventually the carpet will run out and he will plummet into the freezing eclipse air and down a sheer fall, onto the sharpened rocks below. Or, essentially, he will die. Panic sets in. Oh, Jesus. Oh, God, what the hell can he do? Cato cries out and claws at the side of the seats, two rows behind him.
For a second, he hangs there, the train floor ending no more than eight feet below him. The only other seats are to his left, and down too far to rick. The pain in his side is unbearable, and the streak of blood down the train floor only makes it worse. For the life of him, Cato cannot remember at all, he tries but gets nowhere. How much time has passed? How many-?
The seat creaks, and the side he holds onto collapses as the metal gets torn from the seat.
"No-" He gasps, cutting up the side of his palm. The blood is slick and he falls again, his head smacking against the seat two feet down and then he's sure he's dead, as he falls out of the carriage, battering against a railing at the back to the train before gripping, desperately, as his body swings over. It's still pitch black and sleeting and the night air is colder and damper than if he were crying. There is nothing but a chasm below, an abyss, or just death.
Cato feels as if he's hanging by his fingernails. One hand is secured around a bar, the lowest point on the hanging train.With a cry, he brings the other, wounded hand up and grasps the bar. Pain shoots up and down his body, but most of all, the feeling of his pulse, hammering away that reminds him he's alive, God, he's alive and if he can pull himself up and over the bar, and up the seats, he might be able to make it up the cliff.
For what feels like forever, though, Cato remains hanging. Not gripped by fear, but by a memory.
He ran. Yes, that's it. When the gong sounded, Cato had run from the Cornucopia and into the jungle, as far from the other tributes as he could get. For eternities, he seemed to go, looking for water, or food, or shelter. The arena appeared to be some kind of wasteland, like six, if there were jungle. Wrecks of trains and planes and cars were strewn throughout, and he had taken up the first night in the back of an overturned automobile.
During the anthem, where the first eight fallen were screened, a silver parachute landed in the driver's seat and inside had been a small, modest loaf of bread. No doubt costly as hell, but every dime worth it. Sill warm, and the smell had driven Cato to hysterics with gladness. Inside was a note. From Clove, with the wise words 'Don't eat it all at once'.
There are gaps. He doesn't remember where or when he left that piece of shelter, but Cato must have, because his next memory is of waking up from a sleep in a high tree in the leafiest layer of the jungle. The eclipse was working in his favour, and none on the ground saw him. A good thing, too, because, even though his memory is patchy, there was a scream, and a dead girl, from eleven, a spear through her heart. Whoever from the Career pack had stuck her was long gone by the time the canon fired, which told Cato to move out. In the seconds before the hovercraft arrived, he pulled the spear from the girl's body, and headed far away, watchful at every turn.
Cato looks up at the train carriage and wonders how long the bar will hold before the drop to a gory and painful death. The groan of the metal is warning at best, and a promise of death at worst. It spurs him into action, and Cato looks up, seeing the old doorway to the outside platform of the platform open and empty. The train wall will hold better than the rail will, but it's a hell of a jump to get there.
With an evil hiss, He throws himself over the railing and scrambles up, in a frenzy, hearing the metal whine. His torso is thrown over the section of wall, and his feet are pushing hard on the railing below, when the metal whines again and it snaps off, leaving Cato half-safe, his feet still limp and hanging over nothingness.
He breathes a sigh of relief and scrambles over the wall, which is now his floor. Between two walls, one along the carriage side, now upright, and what's now his only solid ground, Cato gets his breath back, and gravely, takes another look at his wound. It's mostly superficial around the ribs, but is driven in scarily deep. Cato winces, because, Jesus Christ, it's bursts of agony and sheerness. It's three, maybe four inches deep and still bleeding out, after God knows how long. This thing shows no sign of clotting.
If Clove were here, he knows what she would say. What he loves her for is her honesty: while others would spoonfed him those old piteous platitudes of pain. Clove would never look him in the eyes and lie to him, tell him that everything was going to be okay, and that it was just a scratch. Cato wouldn't believe it anyway, but he knows, if she were here, she'd slap him hard and say, through gritted teeth 'don't you die on me, you stupid bastard'. That's good, because he doesn't intend to.
However (un)treatable the wound is, it can wait. When he's not hanging over the precipice to his death, with chair breaking and metal snapping and everything going horribly wrong, he can consider the situation. Now's not the time.
Back at the front of the carriage, the silver parachute lays, on the far seat, innocuous enough. Cato can see part of the fabric, and it gives him ambition enough to stand up. He bends his knees and lets out an inhuman noise as he jumps and manages to grip onto the back of a seat further up the carriage. But now he's in intense pain, hanging once more. His shoulders are nearly damn well dislocated, so he brings the other up quickly and scrambles over the top, so that for the moment, he's safe. His eyes have adjusted to the darkness, but the sleet continues to make things difficult.
The seat is going to break at any moment. Cato looks around for somewhere else to flee to, but the next row of seats is too far, and now the metal is creaking and his pulse is hammering against his ribs and he thinks he's going to be sick.
"Shit, shit, shit-" He kicks the glass of the window out that's exactly to his left, and not a minute too soon. The seat snaps backwards and he dives, gasping onto the widow's frame and having his faith rewarded. It's progress, at the very least. He's still alive, and now halfway back up the carriage.
From here, he manages to swing himself onto another set of seats, where the parachute is. Hastily, he tears part of the strings that attach the parachute to the gift and bind the thing around his neck, tightly. It's easy enough to move onto the next set of seats, a jump to the right, and climb over to the row in front of them. All the while, the white vile peaks stare at him thorough the train's open windows and remind him of death, climbing up the carriage to get him. It's a reasonable jump from the first row to the door, which he can push in and grab onto the frame.
He shimmies up the coupler and then into the snow, safe, Jesus Christ, safe on the cliff's edge.
With haste, he tears off the parachute from around his neck and fiddles with the clasp, managing to get it open. Inside are two things. The first is a large, white plaster, for the wound, and the second, he recognises only by smell, is a powerful Capitol medicine. On the tin of the medicine is a small paper note. It's from her. Cato can picture her voice when he reads the words 'hold your Devil by His Spoke and spin Him to the ground'.
He lean back into the snow ad grabs a fistful of it, rubbing the stark white against his blood, to try and clean it. Even in the cold, he knows he will die of blood loss quicker than hypothermia, so Cato takes off his jacket and then shirt, to get a better look at the injury. He cleans it out and scoops a generous serving off medicine onto his fingers and liberally applies it. Then, we wraps it all up with the plaster, and staggers forwards, clothes in hand, off towards the jungle. Back in the snow, the note lays, useless, unwanted.
What good is his 'Devil's Spoke' now? After nearly bleeding out, after nearly dying? He wants something more from Clove, a picture, a sign, something substantial but instead he has-
Oh. Oh. Those aren't her words at all, are they? They're Peeta's. She isn't instructing him,. She's reminding him.
It was Peeta! The boy saved his life, or something equal to it. The first memory is a colour, blue. What's blue? Not the dark, purple sky, and not the same shade as Peeta's eyes, but colder, and with the Capitol's crest flitting about, partially visible. The butterfly! Cato had been looking for shelter when one came into view. It seemed so innocent and beautiful at the time, so he held up a hand. The insect landed on his index finger. And it…it bit him, yes, it bit him, and then he crushed it out of anger.
Then the memories become shiny. That's the only word for it. The jungle comes in distorted frame. Things appeared to expand and collapse, and then Cato swears he heard Clove's voice, him screaming for her, just as she had in the last Game, so he set off running, terrified. Tree barks chirped to him and a shiny black beetle hissed when it saw Cato. He was in agony, dark veins scratched down his arm from the bite, from the venom. He had felt like this before.
Cato remembers being sick, he remembers various stages of blacking out, tumbling down a ravine, and then shouts. He could do nothing but stand with his bloody spear, looking around, spinning wildly, terrified, screaming Clove's name as if she would be the star to his wandering bark. Somebody came crashing through the bush, four different versions of the girl from four, the Career, scars dancing up and down her face. She wielded an axe, a nasty thing, and swung for him.
yes, that's how he cut his side. Cato had turned, so she skimmed his ribs, but the tip got stuck in his side and it had hurt like hellfire. She pulled it out of him, and Cato was certain he'd die when a strange piercing noise rang through the trees and a long, thin arrow became wedged in her temple. Black blood spilled from the wound, and she shit the ground instantly.
Cato fell onto his knees and tried to pick himself up, hearing the roar of the canon and knowing that Careers never moved alone. Somebody else would come for him. The foliage rustled violent and he was certain her District partner was going to avenge her. For a second, he closed his eyes, and allowed death to get a little closer. And then he heard a familiar voice.
The boy with the blonde hair was glowing in his memory. Bright, soft lambency radiated from his skin, and he stood in such a way, frozen with shock, as if he were about to fly away. The canary. Peeta. Cato held up a hand to try to stop any advances, but the boy did not take the easy kill, and shoot him through the neck with his crossbow. The boy dropped it into the snow and knelt in front of Cato.
"Are you hurt?" He had asked, grasping Cato's face ad staring into his eyes. The memory is strange, because Peeta appeared somehow leaner, and whiter, like a column of smoke in combat gear. His eyes seemed too big for his face. Cato was too affected by the venom to answer, and just stared, vacantly ahead. "Cato, don't just sit there, answer me! Are you hurt?"
Then the boy noticed the axe-wound, and he fell backwards onto his hands. A pair of hands fell onto the boy's shoulders, and hoisted him up. The Careers.
Cato screamed out a moment late and he was dragged backwards, fighting forward to get to Peeta, the only one he could trust, the only one who's eyes were kind. The boy was screaming for him, fighting wildly against his own assailant, much taller, much older, and more rehearsed. Cashmere. It all felt like a dream. And she laughed at the boy for his struggling. "That's not going to help you, Loverboy,"
"Cato!" Peeta was red in the face. He was sure to die. "Cato!"
Cato fought and brawled but there were so may and he was slow. The visuals were a second to late and everything went blurry. There was a flurry of fists and then a tug on his hair but he could see nothing, only the sight of Peeta, held still to watch.
"Wake me up!" he had begged the boy, throwing the weight on his left shoulder forward. "Peeta, please, wake me up!" And then his voice had become shrill and panicked and unlike anything he had ever heard.
"Irving!" The boy screamed. "Irving, help!" But the nightmare continued, and then Peeta changed act. ~"It's just a trick, Cato, it's just a trick. They can't hurt you-"
"Then wake me up!" Cato wailed. "Don't let me die! Wake me up-"
He remembers the sound of an arrow, and one of the Careers holing him fell, face-first, into the snow. The others knew what was coming, and as soon as the canon sounded, they cleared out with haste, leaving Peeta with an unfriendly gash across his face, not enough to kill, but enough it disfigure. The snow shuddered ruby with blood, and Cato couldn't breathe.
The boy crawled over to him and assessed the damage in his side.
"You're going to be okay," He said, very seriously. "It's just a scratch. You're fine,"
Cato sat up very slowly, and grabbed the boy by the throat. "Why wouldn't you wake me up?" He hissed. "I was going to die, and you just stood there!" A girl, blonde, and little younger than Peeta, appears in the clearing with a larger crossbow, scouting for enemies. She lets them be, her image magnified too many times, making Cato feel sick and uneasy. He can hear his own blood moving through him.
"I'm sorry," The boy got out, feebly. Cato let Peeta go, and then studied the blood running down his cheeks.
"Whatever happens, in here," He spoke very slowly, having trouble with his diction, and words. Having trouble remembering to whom his heart belonged. This memory is the shiniest of them all. "I don't want to lose you as my friend,"
Peeta smiled his simian smile, too beautiful to be injured like that, to be coughing. "I will never be your friend." He said, so seriously, looking Cato dead in the eyes and at the time that' all Cato saw, the steel shade of blue and something different from either Surplus or boy, something desirable. "no matter what. Ever."
And Peeta was close enough, just-so, that Cato did, he really wanted to lean in and close the gap and taste the boy who smelt of Galbana Lilies and delight, wisdom and grain, flour so earthy and pure that it seemed to germinate on his skin. Cato had wanted him, in those moments.
"If we kiss," He had said, his voice breaking slightly, still looking at Peeta. "If we do that I'm going to feel like shit tomorrow,"
And Peeta laughed. He had the audacity to be beautiful when things around him were at their ugliest. "That's okay with me," he said. There was a shout from the girl and Peeta moved away, for a second, tugging on Cato's arm, and pulling him to standing.
They had little time.
There's no sign of him now. Cato looks around the train wreckage, and the snow, but there's no Peeta, or Irving. No Careers, either. For a second, something cold unfurls in his stomach and he wonders if Peeta has fallen down, from the carriage, off into the abyss, where Cato cannot and wouldn't wish to follow. He still feels faint, and unsteady on his feet, but manages to stagger to standing, clasping the tin of medicine in his fist.
He has to find Peeta.
Cato re-enters the jungle, but the trees are sparser and there are no signs of life or wreckage. He goes as far as he can before the jungle reduces itself to a thicket, and then, he can see stretching out before him, a wide, lifeless plain bereft of timber or anything at all. What strikes him as strange is that, even though it's still sleeting here, bolts of strange, white lightning strafe the plains in various places, but they don't have the look or the crack of usual thunder.
In the distance is a small, overturned car, rusting, but probably worth having a look for salvageables. At least it's in the opposite direction of the jungle, which means he'll be gaining some ground on the Careers. Cato is purposely slow, and pained, as he limps towards the overturned car. The thunder cracks on, and the sleet is cold down his collar. Halfway, and he puts his shirt and jacket back on, feeling the benefit right away.
Just as he drops down by the side of the car, the anthem begins to play.
The fallen include both tributes from eleven, Delysia, the girl from four, male from nine and ten. So, overall there have been fourteen fallen, and there are ten tributes left. Cato watches until the light goes out and the music fades to silence, leaving him in the cold, purple darkness of the eclipse. He lets out a sigh of relief, because, thank whatever stars there are, Peeta I alive, and that means Cato can find him.
But if he were Peeta, where would he go? Cato knows the boy can't have been near the train that hung over the cliff, or he'd be most likely dead. And he'd got that ally, too, Irving, the girl who's handy with thee crossbow, who claimed the first kill at the cornucopia. They have packs, but probably need water. Cato doesn't know the arena well enough to speculate, and this time around he doesn't have Clove to confer with, or to kiss, or to love. Cato kicks at the hard, plains ground, slick with moisture, and curses, stuck.
He goes to step around the shell of the car when a hand snakes from beneath it and latches onto his ankle. It's followed by a face.
"Peeta?" The boy nods once, with a smile too big for his face. And then he vomits.
