A/N: Sorry I've taken so long with this chapter. The holidays have left me without a laptop which is more reliable than my iPad. The good news is I have several more chapters ready to publish. Hope you guys had happy holidays and an even better new year. I've published a second fanfic which is a kind of sequel/companion story to Twilight. Thank you guys for all the support.

A Strength I've Never Known

For the first time since this whole thing began, I sleep on the ground, kind of risky. I refuse to let Rue do the same, I had her take what was left of the rope, and go up one of the trees, so she could sleep safely. If somebody comes around and tries to do something, nothing will protect us and she needs to be safe. The dead tributes were Glimmer and the girl from 4. No one else was killed today, by us anyway. However, during the night, a cannon fires and the image shows the District 10 boy. I wonder how he died. Maybe he was already dying for a while, or maybe Cato got to him. I don't know how many people that leaves us with. The only ones I can think of are Foxface, Thresh, Cato, Clove, and Marvel. The latter three are the primary physical threat to us, Foxface and Thresh are more of our survivalist adversaries. Regardless, this isn't ending anytime soon.

I can move my left arm, but not very much. And the area around the wound is still killing me, we seriously need more medical supplies, or else this thing is gonna get infected. I'm lucky enough as is that the knife wasn't bigger, or that it didn't hit something important. In fact, I'm seriously surprised that it didn't hit anything important. Katniss looks far better, the stings under her leaves are practically gone. In fact, she wakes up not long after I do, those injections did their job and then some. She's facing away from me when she gets up.

"Hey Catnip."

Her eyes light up when she turns and sees me. "Gale?" She immediately perks up, looks at me in shock, before smiling and diving to hug and kiss me. She dives right on my stabbed shoulder, earning her a cry of pain from me. "Ow! Careful."

"Sorry. Sorry." She recoils and looks at my injured shoulder. "What happened?"

"Got into it with Cato. Again. This time, he had a knife. We used what we could to treat it, which wasn't much."

She drops her head. "Fuck."

I look up to find Rue hiding behind a large tree, similar to how she would do in training. I gesture for her to come to us, something Katniss doesn't fail to notice. She looks in the direction gesture, and spots Rue. She comes running towards us, holding Cato's large baton.

"Where did you guys get that?"

"Cato tried to beat me with it." I slightly smile, "The only one that got a beating was him."

Katniss retorts, "And you got the stabbing."

Rue brings back Katniss's bow and arrow. "Managed to get this for you."

Katniss seems happy to have her preferred weapon back. She finally asks the logical question. "How long was I out?"

Rue answers, "About 24 hours. They gave us a parachute specifically for the stings."

"What happened while I was out?"

I answer, "The girls from 1 and 4, and the boy from 10."

Rue tells us both, "Cato and the others are down by the lake. They're still sleeping off the venom. They got all their stuff piled up in this great big pyramid."

Katniss smiles, "That sounds tempting."

Rue mischievously nods, and I giggle.

Rue asks, "How's your shoulder, Gale?"

"It's fine for now. I don't know how long that'll last if we don't get more medical supplies."

Katniss rightfully appears to be dumbfounded, "You got your bag right from the Cornucopia, how did it not contain something for that kind of a wound?"

Rue interjects, "Maybe those only come from sponsors."

I second her. "She's right. Remember, Haymitch said something about how certain things can only come from sponsors. Maybe a trauma kit is among those."

She tilts her head in concession.

Rue tells us that she's going to check some of my snares back at me and her previous campground. Apparently she learned how to reset them just from watching me. She's an old soul in a 12 year old body. I wasn't even that intuitive and smart at that age. Katniss quickly insists she's not going alone. No reason for any of us to stay here. This isn't a permanent settlement for us, just an immediate retreat. I go along with them, still weak from yesterday.

Back in the area me and Rue originally claimed, we found only a single small creature that resembled, but obviously wasn't a rat. Katniss and Rue left to hunt and forage for more food. They didn't want me coming along, straining myself any further than I already have. They gave me the whole animal before they left.

They return with two rabbits, 1 squirrel, one owl, and a whole lot of berries. Now this is a real meal, like the ones we would have back home in the meadow outside the district. Rue also has some more leaves, the ones that she used on my wound. She removes my old bandage, and uses more leaf-chewed paste on a larger leaf as a makeshift replacement. I hope they're enough to stem an infection off, but a part of me thinks that it won't.

"Nice job Catnip. Just like old times."

She smiles a bit, "You know Gale, that wasn't that long ago."

I play smart with her, "Four years ago is kind of a long time."

She sarcastically laughs. Rue's just looking at us with an adorable smile. We continue to crack jokes into the day, talking about how things were before, when we were younger. All about one another's old times.

Rue told us the story behind her token, something she made herself as a good luck charm. Her token is gorgeous, a flower-shaped wooden charm on a length of woven grass loosely around her neck. She apparently forgot to wear it on the day of the reaping, her mother brought it in with her when she visited. It originally didn't have the wooden flower, it was just a grass woven necklace. Her mother got her the wooden flower when an elderly woman at their market gave it to her, for a reason still lost on her to this day. She says that her stylists replaced the original flower with a larger, newer one made of the same wood, but treated with stuff to prevent it from fading as the original did, since it's a couple years old. That reminds me heavily of how I got Katniss her mockingjay pin, how I got it and not having to pay for it.

Rue seems just as surprised at how similar the ways Katniss and herself received their tribute tokens. She thought that it was so romantic me getting Katniss the pin as her token, something that made Katniss and myself blush a little. Yet again, another similarity to my brother Rory, both of them are still to justly make fun of couples (or at least us).

My story is comparably boring. Simply asking my own stylist to get me something that would likely remind me of my home. Portia was clever in making my ring look like coal, though the physical texture betrays the real material. At a glance it's quite convincing. Rue flashes me a seriously? face when I told the short story, Katniss is just as amused.

Suddenly, I remember a question that had popped into my head yesterday. "Katniss, what was in that parachute? The one I saw in the tree."

"Burn medicine." She looks at her healed burn wound. "My guess is the gamemakers didn't like me avoiding the other tributes. Thought it'd be funny to use fire to lure the girl on fire to the careers."

Dark sense of humor. "After the bloodbath, I just kept moving. I found an area next to the river that I felt was safe enough. Two days later I learned it wasn't."

She looks at me in curiosity. "What do you mean?"

Right. I hadn't told her. "Two days after the bloodbath, I was coming back from the river when I was attacked."

Rue comes in too. "The boy from 7. He used a rock sling and hit him in the head."

Katniss recoils in sorrow at hearing this.

I continue, "We fought for a while, me being weaker because of the headstrike. He got the upper hand and was about to stab me."

Katniss is shaking her head, whispering to herself as she typically does when she's under duress.

Rue chimes in again, "That's when I saved him." She scoots next to me. "Hit 7 in the head with a rock from my slingshot." Katniss smiles genuinely and brightly upon hearing this.

I finish what I remember. "I got my knife back when he recoiled, and then I stabbed him in the leg. Later I learned it was fatal."

Rue fills in the gap between me falling unconscious and waking up hours later. "He may have survived, but he wasn't looking so good. I managed to pull him somewhere distant from the scene of the fight." I'm still marveling that she could do that, given our size difference. "He was really bad, especially his head where the rock hit. I did what I could, but I was sure he wasn't gonna make it. Until a parachute came in, with bandages, a needle, and a cream. He recovered within a day because of that stuff."

Katniss simply sits there, unable to form words. After a few minutes, she finally says, "So she saved both of us."

Rue and I look at each other and just nod. She did after all.

I stand up to get some water, and I suddenly get a huge rushing feeling in my head. It for an instant renders my senses of sight and hearing completely useless, and destroys my sense of balance. I grab a tree to keep myself upright, something that Katniss notices. "Gale, are you okay?"

The moment she asks, my senses return, and I no longer feel so light-headed. "Yeah. I'm fine."

The river water is soothing and feels far cooler than normal. I still feel kind of dizzy and I feel a little disoriented. I've been like this ever since I got stabbed by Cato, is this the effect of losing a lot of blood? I don't know what's happening to me. I can soldier my way through this though, I have to. I have to be strong to be able to protect Rue and Katniss.

I recover from my disorientation spell by the time I get back to Rue and Katniss. Apparently, they came up with something while I was away, something they're more than willing to share.

Katniss starts it off, "We have a plan, to even the odds against the careers."

That piques my attention, "Well don't leave me hanging."

Katniss explains, "Rue and you will light three decoy fires, while I find a way to destroy the supply pyramid they have. I don't exactly know, maybe I could just set them on fire."

I have a thought, "Maybe I could set a trap for the first flame."

Rue interjects, "Do you have enough rope left for that?"

When I check the rope left in the backpack, it's nowhere near enough. Not even for an effective snare. Killing one career took up too much rope. The girls seem a little disappointed, but are nonetheless willing to go through with the plan. Katniss tells me, "We'll do it tomorrow morning."

I'm looking forward to this, if we can destroy all the careers's goodies, the odds will drastically tip away from them. We have known for a long time that the careers have very poor survival skills, so forcing them to survive rather than have everything handed to them as always will even the playing field. Atala herself said this, exposure can kill as easily as a knife, so let's fully expose them.

As the afternoon begins fading into twilight, a parachute chime rings through the area. The parachute lands right behind me, and the girls move closer to see what's in it. This one seems bigger than the one with the medicine for Katniss's stings. Inside is a thick rolled up length of very light and very strong rope. The note inside reads: Glad you found her. Don't let her go. H.

Thank you Haymitch. I will say, I wouldn't have expected the note to be so sentimental. The enigmatic man has his reasons, but I don't care at the moment. He just gave us what we needed to show the careers what we're made of. And this length of rope is enough to set several more snare traps around our area.

"Katniss, Rue. Remember the trap I said I couldn't set? Well, it looks like I can set it after all."

Katniss looks a bit apprehensive. I don't think she's had to do anything like this yet, unlike myself who has already directly killed someone. "Katniss. You ok?"

She humors me, "Yes."

I inherently can tell she's not, but we leave it at that. I guess it's better to, for lack of better words, agree to disagree. We don't have much of a choice, if we want to live through this.

Song credit: Praying by Kesha