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Chapter Twenty Two: Conversations

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I wake with a jerk—heavy, sugary syrup clinging to the membranes inside my mouth. The cave comes immediately into sharp relief, backlit by the purple twilight, and it's then that I see the dark haired girl sprawled, face down, on the thin layer of pine needles next to me. There is a dark, viscous puddle of congealing blood underneath her, and crusting the gloves—or socks?—covering her hands.

"Oh shit—Katniss… Katniss!"

I scramble out of the sleeping bag and lurch toward her, heart in my throat as I roll her onto her back. She's unconscious, but warm, and moans when I touch her face, which is white as a sheet. There's a nasty slash above her eyebrow, which explains all the blood, but the most important thing is that she's alive. As I watch, crimson ichor seeps from the gaping slit, running down her temple and into her hair.

"Damn you," I whisper, "I can't believe you tricked me like that."

I don't know whether to be angry or impressed by the combined ingenuity of my fellow tribute and mentor. I peel the socks off her hands and catch her fingers between mine. They're icy, colder than I ever remember them being. I rub some warmth back into them and then lift them to my lips, pressing a tender kiss to their tips. "Don't you ever run off on me again—do you hear me?" I don't think she does.

I turn toward her nearby pack and rummage through it for her trusty first aid kit, where I find bandages and gauze. Then I set to work washing the gore from her face and hair the best I can, which improves things quite a lot. Still, the cut is deep and will undoubtedly need stitches. For now, the best I can do is wrap her head in bandages, and I find myself smiling to myself as I do this, us and our limited healing measures, always falling back on simply wrapping things up. Then I remove her sodden boots and socks, wrap my jacket around her feet, which are even frostier than her hands, and maneuver her into the sleeping bag, huddling in after her.

I realize I'm cold, and not because I'm wracked with fever chills, but because it's just an icy night in the woods, and for the first time I fathom how much better I feel. My mind is clear, my bones and joints free of the lightning-bolt aches, my thunderous headache finally quelled. Even my leg hurts less. As I focus on rewarming the girl next to me, feeling her heart beat against my own in reassurance that, despite her stupid, reckless act, she survived and she's back here next to me, I focus on the one simple truth that will undoubtedly earn my forgiveness: it worked.

I notice the vial on the floor then, the slim, hypodermic needle glinting in the setting sun, and the tiny, blood smeared pack marked with the number '12' next to it. The trickery, the call to the feast, her wound—it all clicks into place. For a moment, I'm stunned. The cost of an antibiotic on day one of the Games would have cost an unbelievable amount of money. Now, on day… What, at least fourteen or fifteen… I can't imagine how many sponsors Haymitch would have had to scrounge together, and from how many different districts… How many people must be rooting for us?

I am so overwhelmed that all I can do for a solid minute is bury my face in Katniss's hair and rock her slowly. Finally, I look up toward the cave opening.

"Thank you," I breathe, choked with tears of gratitude.

The anthem begins to play then, and I fix my eyes on the lavender sky, waiting with anticipation for the Panem seal to fade. But I don't know quite what to feel when it's Clove's image I see in the sky. Shifty, clever Clove. Who never believed my malarkey, even from the beginning.

I swallow the unexpected lump in my throat, turning away to bury my face in Katniss's hair again when no other faces appear in the sky. I don't know why I'm reacting in this way; I'd once considered killing the girl myself. I never liked her, not even a little. Perhaps it's the injustice of it all crashing down on me all over again, or maybe it's not that at all. Maybe it's just relief over Katniss's return that I'm feeling. Or maybe my body's eradicating the remainder of the infection the only way it knows how. No matter what it is, I squeeze my eyes tight and clutch Katniss closer, careful of her head wound, until the uncomfortable sensation fades.

Once it does, I become aware of other sensations in my body, like my extreme thirst and the insistent hunger gnawing at my belly. I drain the rest of the bottle I used to wash the blood off Katniss's head—which slakes my thirst and momentarily balloons my pinched and shrunken stomach. But that doesn't last, so I go foraging in the pack where I know she put the meat she called groosling, the stuff she kept trying to offer me a few days ago, which made me want to puke but now seems very appetizing. Locating it, I strip the meat off the bones three juicy, fatty pieces before I come to my senses.

I murmur a quiet curse, surveying the slightly jaundiced bones that lay huddled on my knee, and then more slowly examine the remaining contents of the bag. There are only three meager portions of the groosling left, and a few small handfuls of dried fruit. I've just consumed half our food supply, with no idea when we'll be able to next replenish it.

"Idiot," I hiss angrily to myself, made only guiltier by the pleasant, full feeling in my stomach. I grab the knife and crawl back into the sleeping bag next to Katniss. "No more groosling for you. Only water till morning."

I notice that the gauze bound around Katniss's head is already sopping without my constant vigilance, and with a degree of alarm, I change it, leaving my free hand pressed against it for good measure, my thumb caressing the side of her face.

The antibiotic has made my senses sharper, and the long respite brought on by the sleep tincture has given me the rest needed to stand watch through the night. Unfortunately, with my senses clearer, it only gives me more opportunity to mull things over. What the others must be doing, where they're hiding out, how and when this all will end. I feel eons more revived than I did yesterday, but I know I'm nowhere near as strong as I was the first day, strengthened by the training, and fortified by the Capitol food. I've lost fifteen or twenty pounds since, and it's safe to say all the muscle I've put on in training has wasted away. Will the Gamemakers give us enough time for me to recover enough strength to put on a good show for the final fight? Or will they want to end it sooner than that? I find myself hoping, and putting faith in, the former. I don't know exactly what happened at the feast, but it usually puts on an entertaining enough episode to tide the audience over for a couple of days.

I spend the night holding out hope, realizing for the first time that we could feasibly accomplish this, Katniss and I. We could win this thing… But am I getting my hopes up too soon? Thresh and Cato are both still out there—and though the first has been a big mystery this entire time, it doesn't take a genius to see that he's a clear menace. And Cato's been the one to beat this entire time. Finch, too, has kept herself well hidden. There's no telling whether she'll leap out at the last minute with some hidden weapon. Knowing her, she'll find some sneaky way to trick us all—make a trap, or poison us all.

It starts raining sometime before dawn—an all of a sudden, bucketing downpour so that I know it's a move made by the Gamemakers and not a natural occurrence of whatever weather cycle they've programmed into this year's arena. Soon, it begins to thunder and lightening. Every once in awhile, the sky ignites a brilliant green color and, as the sun begins to rise, the horizon fades into a mélange of teal, viridian and bright, vivid pink. It's around this time that the water finds its way through a fissure in the rocks overhead and splatters in a big, fat drop on Katniss's forehead. She mutters something in her sleep, tossing her head, and I see that her bandage has been soaked through again. I idly note the concern in that while I fish out the sheet of plastic from her supplies and wedge it over our heads, which deflects the rain for the most part, and then change the soiled bandage. While I'm out and about, decide to take a quick inventory of my wounds, noticing the huge improvement in my leg. The red streaks have entirely receded, and the swelling is greatly reduced. There's still a bit of redness around the rim of the opening, but it doesn't look nearly as ghastly as it did just yesterday.

It's a couple hours later when her dreams begin to make her restless, her face pinching as she moans and murmurs unhappily in her sleep, tossing a little. I stroke her cheek gently, hoping this will soothe her like it did before.

"Katniss?" I murmur. Her lashes quiver as she stirs, but doesn't quite rise into full consciousness. "Katniss, can you hear me?"

This time she blinks, and then jerks into wakefulness as she comprehends my face. First alarm passes through her eyes, quickly followed by confusion, swiftly replaced by comprehension and then, finally, an expression of peace.

"Peeta," she whispers, and there is such trust and relief in her voice that I feel a physical tug at my heart.

"Hey," I murmur, stroking her cheekbone with my thumb, "Good to see your eyes again."

"How long have I been out?" She turns her head, eyeing our surroundings.

"Not sure," I admit. "I woke up yesterday evening and you were lying next to me in a very scary pool of blood." My eyes flash up to the bandage strapped over her forehead, still clean and white, I note with relief. "I think it's stopped finally, but I wouldn't sit up or anything."

Her hand flies to her head, fingertips gently prodding the thick padding over her incision, and then following its extension into her hair where I've tied it around her skull. "Thank you," she whispers, almost inaudibly.

"No problem," I tell her, because truly it wasn't. She did so much more for me, anyway.

I reach for the full water bottle and help her drink. When she's had her fill she says, "You're better."

"Much better," I concur. "Whatever you shot into my arm did the trick. By this morning, almost all the swelling in my leg was gone."

For a long minute she stares at me, her eyes a storm of unanswerable emotions and questions. Finally she says, "Did you eat?"

I sigh guiltily. "I'm sorry to say I gobbled down three pieces of that groosling before I realized it might have to last a while. Don't worry, I'm back on a strict diet."

"No, it's good. You need to eat," she insists. "I'll go hunting soon."

But the idea of her out in the woods while she still looks so colorless and fragile… "Not too soon, all right?" I cajole. "You just let me take care of you for a while."

She really must not be feeling well, because she consents without a single word of argument, letting me feed her morsels of groosling and dried fruit, and then it's my turn to force gallons and gallons of water upon her. It might be wrong of me, but I feel a sick sort of satisfaction when she eventually pushes the bottle away. When she starts to shiver, I take her glacial feet in my hands and massage them until they're warm again, and then wrap my jacket around them for an added layer of insulation before tucking them back into the sleeping bag.

"Your boots and socks are still damp and the weather's not helping much."

The Gamemakers are obviously tuned in to our conversation, because just then there comes a loud bang of thunder, and then a brilliant flash of lightning. I watch her examine the forks it makes across the sky, and then she tilts her head back to examine the impromptu plastic awning I created in the small hours of the morning.

"I wonder what brought on this storm? I mean, who's the target?" I pretend to ponder, hoping the words will encourage her to speak. She's so quiet, and I'm dying to know what happened at the Cornucopia…

"Cato and Thresh," Katniss blurts straight away. "Foxface will be in her den somewhere and Clove…" She trails off abruptly, going white around the lips. "She cut me and then…"

I feel my face fall. "I know Clove's dead," I tell her quietly, softly. "I saw it in the sky last night… Did you kill her?"

She's quiet for a long time, refusing to look at me, and I wonder if she'll refuse to answer.

"No," she finally answers. "Thresh broke her skull with a rock."

I flinch, unable to stop myself. "Lucky he didn't catch you, too."

Her eyes shift, becoming unfocused, and I know that she's found herself caught up in that horrific moment from yesterday morning. I brush a stray strand of hair off her forehead, but I don't think she notices. "He did," she says eventually, dazedly. "But he let me go."

"Why would he do that?" The words come out flat, bemused. It doesn't make any sense.

"Because…" She shakes her head in a small, unconscious gesture, dark brows knitting. "Because he owed me. That thing with the tracker jackers? That was Rue's idea. She was right there, in the tree next to me, right before it happened. She ran before I dropped it on you, and after I got stung and passed out from the venom"—We both flinch, remembering the awful pain, the dizzying hallucinations, the horrific nightmares, the inability to discern reality from illusion—"she nursed me back to health, taught me how to use the leaves as a poultice… I taught her how to set some snares, we shared food and supplies… We decided to become allies." She's quiet for a moment, seeming to forget that I'm there.

I reach out, touching her jaw. "Katniss?"

She looks up, her gaze locking on mine, silver fire sparking beneath her lashes. "We sabotaged the Careers' food supply. It was—booby-trapped or something; they'd buried—"

"Landmines around it, yeah."

"You helped do that?"

"I had to."

She seems to accept this, and carries on with her story. "The plan was to—" She notices that her voice has dropped to a whisper, her eyes wide and vacant, lost looking. She clears her throat and forces her words to an audible level, but doesn't lose the vacant expression. "The plan was to set a bunch of bonfires, with lots of green wood so they'd smoke—hopefully draw the Careers away from their camp. She'd keep moving, set the third one on her own and then take to the trees. We were supposed to meet back at the place we had our first meal together, but…"

"What happened?"

"The ruse worked… I was hiding in the bushes at the edge of the clearing, watching the boy from Three—"

"Pixel," I say.

"What?"

"His name was Pixel."

"Pixel," she repeats. "He was guarding it. I was trying to figure out what the deal was with the trap when Foxface came out of nowhere, jumping from place to place in this strange little dance. At one point she lost her balance and fell, and she screamed, but nothing happened, so she kept going. Took some food and shot out of there like a bat out of hell. Three—Pixel—never noticed a thing. And then I realized about the mine thing, so I blew it all up. Except that I misjudged how powerful the explosives were, and it damaged my hearing. I lost it entirely for a while in both ears, but I think it's gone for good in my left."

I'm shocked. She never gave any indication, but I guess there have been other things on my mind.

"Cato killed Pixel when they got back," she continues numbly. "He just… snapped his neck. Like he was a twig"—I flinch—"and then I ran like a spooked rabbit. But when I got to our rendezvous point, Rue wasn't there, so I got worried, went looking for her, and that's when—" She clenches her teeth audibly, eyes moistening.

"It's okay, Katniss," I whisper, stroking her arm.

But she shakes her head. "No," she argues, but goes on anyway. "There was this… signal we made up, a whistle we sang to the mockingjays so we could communicate. And so when I started to hear it, I thought… I thought she was going to be okay. But then, I heard her scream. And just as I got to her, the boy from One stabbed her with his spear." Her voice is broken and cracked, tears slipping down her face. "So I killed him," she whispers, and then her voice suddenly turns hard, brutal, unforgiving. "I shot him in the throat with an arrow, and he died right there in front of her so she could see."

She doesn't continue for a very long time, and I cautiously ease my arms around her, half expecting her to push me away, but she doesn't. Instead, she lets me hold her.

When she finally begins to speak again, she's regained control of her voice and her emotions. "I sang to her as she died, and then I buried her in flowers before the hovercraft came to take her away. And as I was walking away, I got another sponsor gift. It was a loaf of Eleven bread, and at first I thought it must have been meant for Rue, that there had been some kind of mistake, and I was confused about why the district had authorized Haymitch to give it to me instead—until I realized they'd done it to thank me, for taking care of Rue, for giving her a proper burial."

A fluttering, poignant sensation flows through me at this unheard of gesture. That poor little girl… "Has anything like that ever happened before?"

"I don't think so… Anyway—they probably didn't show it on the air."

I shake my head. "Probably not." And then I'm filled with a sudden surge of anger. Of course the Capitol wouldn't want to take ownership for their culpability in that little girl's death.

"But I told Thresh about it, about the bread, and me and Rue being allies, and the flowers and singing her to sleep… And he said that it made us even, that because of Rue, he owed me. So… He let me go."

I take a minute to ponder her words, but they whirl around and around in my brain, once in awhile rebounding off the inside of my skull like a rubber ball, never finding a resting place, fidgety and inconceivable. "He let you go because he didn't want to owe you anything?"

"Yes," she says, exasperated. "I don't expect you to understand it. You've always had enough. But if you'd lived in the Seam, I wouldn't have to explain."

Something about her words irk me—just because I've lived in the Merchant Village all my life, does that automatically make my life easy?

"And don't try," I retort. "Obviously I'm too dim to get it."

She sighs. "It's like the bread," she tries to explain. "How I never seem to get over owing you for that."

This distracts me, blows the petulance away. "The bread? What? From when we were kids? I think we can let that go. I mean, you just brought me back from the dead."

"But you didn't know me."

I knew you, I think.

"We had never spoken. Besides, it's the first gift that's always the hardest to pay back. I wouldn't even have been here to do it if you hadn't helped me then." She pauses, as if something has just occurred to her, and locks those stunning eyes on mine. "Why did you, anyway?" They demand answers, those eyes, the way they probe mine without mercy—hard as nails, and yet as soft as the rabbit pelts I've seen hanging in the Hob.

"Why?" I repeat, and my heart makes all its revitalized supremacy known in this very moment, as it pounds almost painfully in my chest. "You know why."

But she stubbornly shakes her head.

"Haymitch said you would take a lot of convincing." He never said any such thing. In fact, I don't know why I've said the words; why am I delaying the inevitable?

"Haymitch?" she queries, befuddled. "What's he got to do with it?"

This all suddenly feels way too real—much too… Possible. Why, I wonder, was it so much easier to admit my feelings for her when I assumed I'd be dead by now? It again dawns on me that we could win this thing together, we could go home to District Twelve, move into the Victors' Village, and we could… What? I think. I've been in love with this girl for eleven years. She never knew I existed until the reaping. So far, her responses and cues have been encouraging, but… Am I pushing too hard? Wishing for something that really isn't there?

So I chicken out. "Nothing," I say instead. "So, Cato and Thresh, huh? I guess it's too much to hope that they'll simultaneously destroy each other?"

"I think we would like Thresh," she grumbles, and to my surprise, she sounds upset. "I think he'd be our friend back in District Twelve."

"I think you and I might have been friends, in another life." Coral's distantly spoken words, from that second day down by the lake, after she taught me how to float, bombard me with a suddenness I haven't been expecting. The pain of it blows through me like a grenade, threatening to shatter a part of me I wasn't aware was still intact.

I force myself to focus.

This is exactly the kind of thing Katniss absolutely cannot say on air, and once again, I find myself covering for her, lest we find ourselves on the brink of treason. "Then let's hope Cato kills him, so we don't have to."

I watch as her face crumples, tears rising once more in her eyes.

"What is it? Are you in a lot of pain?"

She sniffs delicately and says in a small voice, "I want to go home, Peeta."

"You will. I promise."

"I want to go home now," she insists as her lower lip begins to tremble.

As tender as this vulnerable Katniss is, this is not the girl who's going to claw her way into the final two. So I say, "Tell you what. You go back to sleep and dream of home. And you'll be there for real before you know it. Okay?"

"Okay," she whispers. "Wake me if you need me to keep watch."

"I'm good and rested, thanks to you and Haymitch," I assure her. "Besides, who knows how long this will last?" I add, gesturing toward our surroundings.

Do I mean the storm, or the privacy it gives us? Even I don't know.