Let Me Fly

by Fanfic Allergy

When a plague hits District Twelve, Katniss is forced to make some very hard decisions. Together with Gale and what's left of their families, they decide to escape District Twelve, taking a reluctant Peeta Mellark with them. Main Fic of the Mockingjay Songs Series. Peeta/Katniss/Gale relationship.

8. Let Me Fly - Somewhere That's Green

Let Me Fly
by FanficAllergy & RoseFyre

oOo

Chapter Eight: Somewhere That's Green

oOo

Last Time in Let Me Fly:

"Would you believe, of all things, the instructions came out of that book your mom's been reading?"

I blink in disbelief. "The romance novel?"

"Yup."

I shake my head. I guess it is worth more than just kindling.

oOo

We get a late start the following morning. While having the meat is a nice safety blanket and it means that we don't have to worry about running out of food, unfortunately, it also means that we have to travel slower. The travois snags on bushes and fallen trees and it takes time for my mother and Peeta to get used to dragging it behind them. Even with the travois, the packs all of us carrying are still heavy.

Right before we call a halt for the day, Peeta spots a cave. We drop our stuff under a copse of trees and Gale, Peeta, and I head off to investigate.

As we approach the cave we immediately smell the stench of bat guano. We glance into the cave and the smell is even worse. We don't even bother with a light. It's not going to work.

We head back to camp. "That cave is shit," Gale says, stating the obvious.

"Well duh. What kind of cave did you want?" Peeta asks.

Gale glances over at Peeta. "Definitely nothing with bats."

"Or bears," I add. "Or snakes. And no mutts either."

"So pretty much nothing living in the cave?" Peeta says with a smile.

I smile back. "Sounds about right."

"So what else?"

Gale shrugs. "I don't know. Dry would be good."

"Dry would be good what?" my mother asks.

"How was the cave?" Prim pipes up.

I sink to the ground next to my pack. "Full of bats."

"Ewwwwww!"

Gale sits down next to me. "That's what we thought."

"So what was this about dry being good?" my mother asks. "Was the cave wet too?"

"We didn't get close enough to find out," Gale answers. "We were just talking about what we want in a cave."

She nods. "And what did you come up with so far?"

"Nothing living in it. No snakes, no bears, no bats, no rats, no mutts." Peeta ticks off each item with his fingers.

Prim wrinkles her nose at the list. "No arguments there."

He holds up another finger. "And dry. That's as far as we'd gotten."

"Would the whole cave have to be dry? What if there's a spring inside? What if there's a hole in the roof, like a smoke hole?" my mother asks.

"A smoke hole would be nice," Gale says.

"It would also make it look more like a mine fire," Peeta points out, crouching down to start making the fire.

"A spring wouldn't be bad," I say, "so long as it's not all over. And if we don't have one, that's okay too. We just need to be near water."

"What about space?" Gale tosses out. "How big a cave do we want?"

"I think we'd want one that isn't too big, but also not too small," my mother chimes in, thinking about it. "I'd like to have more than one chamber. You know, so we could have some privacy. And I know a bedroom would be nice."

"And storage that's not in the main room," Peeta adds.

"Only one entrance could be good," Gale interjects. "It would be easier to defend."

"Defend from what?" Rory asks.

"Bears, wolves, whatever else is out there," I answer.

"It shouldn't be too visible from the air," Peeta points out. "We don't want the Capitol to spot us."

"I'd like someplace where we could actually do some farming," my mother says. "I brought along some seeds, and as long as we get them into the ground in the next few weeks, we should be able to have a decent crop."

"You're gonna have to be careful about that," Gale cautions. "We don't want it to look like a garden."

"Yes, I know," my mother replies.

"We'll need good hunting, fishing, gathering," I say. "There's no way we'll be able to farm everything. We need lots of game. Good fishing would be nice too. Not totally necessary, but it's easy."

"And I know how to make nets!" Prim offers.

"So it sounds like we really want to be near water," Peeta says, looking up from the small fire he's nursing.

"Near a river or a lake, but high enough up that the cave won't flood," I say.

"There is no way we're going to find a cave with all of this," Rory says.

Prim shrugs. "Who knows? We might. We'll never know if we don't look."

"I'd like it if the cave faced south," my mother interjects before Rory and Prim can get into another argument. "It'll get the best light."

"How do you know that?" Peeta wants to know.

She holds up the romance novel.

I shake my head. "I can't believe the Capitol would let us have a book like that."

"To be fair, there's a lot of sex, especially later on. And there's a lot of other fantastical elements. I don't think they really realized just how much research the author did and just how accurate it is. They also probably didn't see it as a threat. Who wants to go beyond the fence?"

I look around at our small group. "We did."

"Only after it became too dangerous to stay."

She has a point.

oOo

For the rest of that day and the next day, we soldier on. We don't see much that looks promising and because of all the noise, I don't succeed in getting anything with my bow.

We find another cave but the entrance is too near the stream we've been following and it looks like it'll flood in even a light rainstorm. It's discouraging.

The day after we find the second unusable cave is sunny and warm. I take the opportunity to scale a large tree to get a better lay of the land.

I'm glad I do. "Smoke!" I yell down to the rest of the group. "I think I see smoke in the distance!"

"How far away?" Rory asks, his desire to stop traveling evident in his tone.

I motion with one hand. "I think it's in the mountains to the northwest. It's pretty far away so I can't be sure, but I think it's smoke."

My mother smiles. "So Solomon was right."

"It's no guarantee that it's actually a mine fire. It could be something else," Gale says.

"True. I guess we'll have to get a little closer."

I climb down. "It's pretty clear this stream we've been following runs along a mountain valley. There's a bunch of hills in the area, there might be caves in them. If there aren't, we can start looking in the mountains themselves."

"Do we want to go closer to where you saw the smoke?" Peeta asks.

"No," Gale says, "that would be a bad idea. Don't you remember what they talked about in school? Going too near a mine fire is a stupid idea. There's sinkholes. There's toxic fumes. The ground becomes unstable." He punctuates each item by smacking his fingers into the palm of his hand. "The last thing we want to do is live in a cave on top of one those."

Peeta opens his mouth to say something, but my mother jumps in, heading off another argument, "I say we keep going north until we find a suitable place to live."

I'm hoping it will be soon. I'm getting sick of traveling and it's starting to affect me. I haven't gotten any game in days and I know it isn't because there isn't any game to be had, because Gale's been coming back to camp with everything from a pheasant to large rabbits.

I'm starting to feel a little useless.

I try to hide what I'm feeling from the others. But I don't succeed.

When we stop for the night on the day we spot smoke, Peeta asks if he can join me in my foraging and hunting attempt.

I agree, although I regret it minutes later. He's loud and completely incapable of quieting his steps. I do my best to show him how to avoid stepping on twigs and leaves, but he doesn't get it. Finally, unable to deal with yet another day of failure, I snap. "You're useless! This is never going to work! I don't know why I brought you along!"

Peeta freezes, going pale. His eyes reflect his hurt. "Katniss…"

I stop, open-mouthed, realizing what I just said. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean that we shouldn't have brought you along completely." I sit down hard on the ground. "That didn't come out right either. I know you didn't have a choice to come with us or not. I'm sorry we took you away from your family. But I'm not sorry you're with us." I stare down at my hands. "This isn't coming out right."

Peeta sits down next to me. "It's coming out fine. I know it was either this or you and Gale kill me, and frankly I'd rather be alive with you than alive without you."

I look at him and say eloquently, "Huh?"

"I know, it's weird, right?" He leans back, staring at the passing clouds. "Naturally I miss my brothers, but out here...I have an opportunity to do something I never did living back in Twelve."

I raise an eyebrow in confusion.

He continues, tilting his head to look at me. "Out here, I get to be with you. I get to talk with you."

"I don't understand."

Peeta rubs the back of his neck. "I'm trying to figure out how to say this without it coming out wrong."

"Just say it."

"I've been dreaming about this for years. I've made up whole scenarios about how we'd finally meet and get to know each other." He snorts. "Heck, one of them was we'd both been selected as tributes for the Games and then you couldn't ignore me. Stupid, right?"

I shake my head at the image. "A little. But why? I'm a nobody."

"Not to me. Never to me!" he says vehemently. "Please don't take this the wrong way, but I've been in love with you since we were five years old."

"What? How?"

"You remember the first day of school?" he asks, leaning toward me. "You were wearing that red checked dress and your hair was in two braids. The teacher asked if anyone knew the Valley Song and you did, so you stood up and sang it."

I frown. "Vaguely?"

His voice takes on a faraway tone. "I'd never heard anyone sing like that before. Even the mockingjays outside stopped singing to listen to you. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. I didn't stand a chance and from that moment on, I was gone."

I'm a bit overwhelmed. I know Gale cares about me. But it's a more recent thing built out of friendship. Peeta's declaration is completely unexpected and I don't know what to think. "Why didn't you ever talk to me?"

"I was scared. Here you were, this amazing independent beautiful person, and then there's me." He motions to himself. "I'm not much of anything. Certainly not good enough for someone perfect like you."

"I'm not perfect."

"I know that now." He shrugs. "It's just no time ever seemed right, you know? You were always with Gale or Madge or Prim or off by yourself. And what could I talk to you about? 'I'm sorry your dad died, here have some bread.' or 'How about those Hunger Games, nice to see one of our tributes make it past the bloodbath for once.' No, better to keep my distance. At least then you wouldn't reject me."

"I guess. But what changed? I could just as easily reject you now."

"Yeah, you could. And I wouldn't blame you if you did. You don't know me." He pauses, looking around the woods. "But being out here, I finally get it. I get why you like it. It's freeing." He takes a deep breath then turns to regard me seriously. "Even if you do reject me, at least now I can say that I've talked to you. That I've told you how I feel. Everything now is up to you."

"But-"

He holds up a hand to stop me. "I don't expect you to become my girlfriend now. Or ever. You get to decide what you do with the information. It's not up to me anymore." He reaches out to take my hand, then stops himself midway. It's like he doesn't feel he has the right to touch me until I give him permission. Instead, he puts the offending hand in his lap and says, "Whatever you decide isn't going to stop how I feel about you. You're still the amazingly wonderful girl you were back in Twelve. You're still the girl who's done everything to save her family. So you're having a couple of bad days - that's all it is. A couple of bad days. Just look at everything you've done in the last week. You got the pig. You and Gale took down that bear mutt and then you killed the other bear. You've been feeding us along the way with both your hunting and your gathering. You're not a failure."

I can barely process everything he just told me. Instead, I fixate on his last sentence. "How did you know that's what I was thinking?"

"I've spent a long time watching you, Katniss," Peeta says with a light blush. "I've become pretty familiar with figuring out what you're thinking. I'm still not totally perfect, but maybe with time I'll get there." He looks down at his hands. "I'm not saying this to put pressure on you. That's the last thing I want to do. I just want you to know I understand. And I'm here for you. However you need me. All I really want is just to be with you, in whatever way you're comfortable with. If that's just as a friend, I'm okay with that. If it's something more, I'm okay with that too."

I'm not sure what to do with his confession. "So you're okay with us kidnapping you?"

Peeta smiles. "I'm getting there. Give me time."

"Does that mean you'll forgive us?"

"I forgive you." There's an emphasis on the last word. "We're friends now. Friends forgive each other. Do you forgive me for making you uncomfortable right now?"

I smile back at him. "Yeah. I do. That's what friends do."

"So as a friend, can I ask you a question?"

"I guess?" I'm a little nervous about what he's going to ask.

"What's your favorite color?"

"I don't know. That's going a bit far."

He laughs. "No really. What is it?"

"Green. You?"

"Orange."

"Like a sunset?"

A smile lights up his face. "Exactly."

oOo

I give up trying to hunt the rest of the day, but Peeta and I spend a lot of our time gathering plants and talking about our childhoods. I'm a little surprised at how comfortable I am, despite his confession. He's not pushing at all.

We return to camp with a bunch of stuff we've foraged. Some of the plants are things that we haven't seen before along the trip but that I recognize from the book from my father. Peeta goes over to help my mother with dinner and Gale pulls me aside.

"What's up with you and Mellark?" He asks without any preamble.

"Nothing," I say, pulling my arm out of Gale's hand. "He's a friend."

"Since when did Mellark become your friend?"

"Since he noticed I was feeling down and tried to cheer me up."

"Down about what?" His voice is confused and there's a hint of hurt running through it. "Are you regretting kissing me? You've been avoiding me ever since then."

I wince. He's not wrong. "I'm sorry? I needed to figure things out for myself."

"Figure what out?"

"Just things. I never had time to think about having a relationship before, Gale. And now I'm getting bombarded on two sides."

"Two sides? Wait…what..." Realization dawns in his eyes. "Mellark's in love with you too!"

I flinch guiltily. I didn't mean for that to come out. "Yes? He just told me."

"And now you're friends?"

"I guess."

"So what'd you say when he told you? Did he ask you out?" He demands without giving me time to respond. "Did you say yes? Do you want to date Mellark?" He's pacing, running his hands through his hair.

"No. Yes. I don't know!" I'm frustrated. This isn't something I wanted to talk to Gale about. Not now. Not ever.

He stops his pacing to face me. His shoulders are slumped and there's pain in his eyes. "What about me?" His voice pleads with me to give him some hope. "I thought you and I were good, Katniss. I thought we had something."

"We do have something!" I say, taking a step closer to him. "You're my best friend. Pretty much my only friend until now. I liked kissing you. I liked it a lot. But, I don't know how I feel about it. I'm confused. I'm frightened. And I don't know if I want to date anyone right now!"

Gale throws up his hands in frustration. "Let me know when you've made up your mind. I love you, Katniss. That's never going to stop." He comes over and takes my hands in his. "Just give me a chance. I'll wait for you as long as you need me to. But, please, just think about it."

"I will."

He nods once and drops my hands. "I'll see you back at camp."

I watch him go, wondering just what I did to get two guys to declare their love for me. It's overwhelming. I sit down heavily on the ground and stare at the canopy of trees overhead. Just what am I going to do about Gale? About Peeta? Nothing has prepared me for this.

I feel like a heroine in a Capitol soap opera.

oOo

The next day is uncomfortable. Gale and I aren't really speaking and he keeps glaring at Peeta. Peeta ignores him.

My mother looks at me sympathetically and I flush. I'm embarrassed that my love life is public knowledge.

To avoid everyone, I range further ahead than I normally do and I manage to get a small squirrel. I bring it back to the group and Peeta shoots me an encouraging smile. "I knew you could do it."

I smile at him in thanks.

Gale just glares.

We follow the stream until it joins a large river. By then, it's late enough that we decide to set up camp.

While everyone else does so, I take the opportunity to kill a duck and a goose that were foraging in the marshy areas along the river. When I get back to camp, there's a palpable sense of excitement.

"Katniss! Katniss! Rory found a cave! We were gathering firewood and he saw an opening up there on that hill!" Prim points south toward a large hill.

"And?"

"I wouldn't let them go look. We were waiting for you in case there was anything inside," my mother says.

I nod.

"Come on, let's go look!" Prim grabs my hand and starts tugging me toward the hill.

I want to go. But someone should stay here with our things. I'd rather leave Prim and Rory, but from the looks on their faces I can see that they'd refuse.

Peeta must see the same thing because he says, "I'll stay here at the camp and start making dinner. You can tell me how it goes when you get back." He takes out his knife and starts disemboweling the waterfowl, feeding Buttercup the entrails.

I smile at him gratefully.

Gale pauses for a moment. "Sounds good."

I suddenly realize that we're leaving Peeta alone with all of our supplies and Prim's cat. As good of a hunter as Buttercup is, he's still no match for Peeta. Gale must have thought the same thing but decided to trust the merchant. It's a huge sign of trust on Gale's part.

We fish out the flashlights we brought with us from our packs and head for the cave. We've been saving them for emergencies, because once the batteries run out we have no way of replacing them.

When we reach the cave, I take a deep breath. I really want this one to be good. I am really sick of traveling. I let it out and force my mind to become detached, analytical.

The entrance is about five feet across, big enough to fit things through but small enough to be able to defend easily. That's a good sign. The opening appears to have formed when a chunk of the hill broke off. I can see several large boulders at the base of the hill along with the remains of several trees that the rocks took with them. There's about a three foot rock ledge jutting from the base of the opening, but it appears stable enough. To the left of the entrance the hill slopes down gently, while the right is steeper. I wouldn't want to climb that unless I didn't have a choice.

I take point, my mother right beside me, shining the light into the cave so we all can see. I don't see any glittering of eyes or water. It's time to go inside.

We step into the gloom and pause to let our eyes adjust. Even with the flashlight, it's still hard to see.

I take several deep breaths through my nose while we wait. I don't smell anything. That's promising.

I strain my ears, listening for the sounds of movement inside the cave. There's a slight sound of dripping. Gale and I share a look. He hears it too. We don't know if that's good or bad.

I look around trying to pinpoint the source of the sound, taking in my surroundings. The main room is probably about the same size as our house was in Twelve. There's four dark openings spread around the outside of the room. The walls slope steeply toward the floor in the back, but near the front of the cave, they're almost vertical. The ceiling is about seven feet high.

Gale is able to reach up and touch it with his hands. "I don't see any sign of bats," he says, looking at his fingers.

I motion over to the left. "The dripping sound is coming from over there. We should check that out first."

So we do.

My mother shines her flashlight through the small opening. It's not entirely flush with the floor of the main room and we have to step up and over a lip of rock to enter this new space. The room is much smaller than the one we just left and more circular. Most of the space is taken up by a large fissure in the ground. Inside of the fissure, there's water. A pool. The surface of the water is maybe about six inches lower than the floor. My mother shines her flashlight down into the pool and... nothing. We can't see the bottom. Rory points the other flashlight up. The ceiling is higher than in the main room and we see one large stalactite dripping water into the pool.

We look around, taking in the space. My mother says, "Is that a bucket?" She shines her flashlight on it.

I head over to investigate. Next to the pool, there's a large wooden bucket that holds maybe about five gallons of water. Beside it, there's a rotting bit of rope attached to the handle.

"Someone's been here before," Gale says unnecessarily.

"Not recently," I say, examining the frayed bit of rope.

"Well, with that here, I'm guessing that the water is drinkable." My mother leans down and dips her finger into the pool and sniffs it. "It smells fine." She tastes the tip of her finger. "It's fresh. A little minerally, but otherwise it seems good."

"Anything living in there?" Gale asks.

My mother shines her flashlight into the pool again. "I don't see anything. I'm guessing this is rainwater that has seeped through the earth."

There isn't really space in this room for anything but the pool. And there's no other openings. We head back into the main room.

"So far so good," I say. "Let's check out the rest of the cave."

We continue along clockwise to the next room. It's brighter than the pool room but not much brighter. It's also larger with sloping walls and a high ceiling. There's a little bit of light filtering down from directly overhead. We look up to see a small hole.

"Well that's useful," my mother says. "We could set a fire in here and it'd look like the hill's smoking."

"Looks like someone else had the same idea." Gale gestures to the remains of a fire slightly to the side of the hole. Other than that and a small pile of what looks to be trash, the room is empty.

We move back out into the entry room and go to the next opening. It's a large empty space with several niches along the walls. There's some rubble on the floor underneath some of the niches. I bend down to investigate and find a few broken nuts and rocks. It looks like maybe an animal hibernated here several years ago. I examine the dirt floor more closely. There's no other tracks, which is good, but that doesn't mean we're home free. There's another dark opening in this room and we need to investigate it.

When we do, we discover a long narrow room. Just like in the previous room, there are several niches of various sizes and shapes pockmarking the walls. The ceiling slopes down sharply to the left of where we entered and to our right we can see daylight.

"That must lead back to the entry room," my mother says.

Rory scampers off to investigate. "Yup!" he chirps when he returns. "It does!"

The cave's pretty much perfect. Other than the entryway facing north, it hits almost everything we were looking for. It's large enough to hold all of us as well as store supplies for the winter. There's even a water source and a smoke hole inside.

More importantly it's far enough away from Twelve. We've got to be at least eighty miles away. That should be far enough that a random hovercraft won't be able to spot us.

I think we should stay. If we're going to make it through the winter, we need to settle down.

I look around at the rest of the group. They're all smiling; they've come to the same conclusion I have. We need to tell Peeta.

We head back down to camp, a spring in our step.

Peeta looks up from where he's roasting the duck over the fire. "So, how'd it go?"

"I think we've found home."

oOo

AN:
Written: 2/6/15
Revised: 2/13/15
Revised 2: 3/10/15

The title of this chapter comes from the song of the same name from the musical Little Shop of Horrors.

So...the book. We're sure you've all realized just how convenient this "romance novel" is. We couldn't, in good conscience, give them a survival guide (other than the Everdeen family plant book), because they'd have no way to get one. But, the Capitol probably wouldn't realize just how useful other books could be. The "romance novel" is an anthology of the first three books of Jean Auel's "Earth's Children" series - Clan of the Cave Bear, Valley of Horses, and The Mammoth Hunters. We figured the Capitol would like it for the romance (trust us, there's a lot of sex in there, much of it badly-written), but it's well-researched and also has a ton of useful information. The Capitol would not necessarily realize exactly much useful info is in there. We figured Mrs. Everdeen read it as teenager, loved the survival and the characters and the romance, and reread it multiple times, and it's part of the reason she has so much survival knowledge. We realize it's a bit of a deus ex machina, but we do know just what it does and does not cover, and you'll see later on some things they can't learn from it. Like basket making.

We deliberately picked an area that we knew had caves. As a matter of fact, the area itself has several kinds of mines including limestone. Because there's limestone mining, that means that this likely a karst landscape. There are several large tourist caves within fifty miles of where we're putting them and one very major one approximately twenty miles away. That means there are also smaller, less showy caves in the area as well. The location that we picked - well, we know the surrounding area (thank you Google Earth), what's there, and how it works. We made sure we knew what natural (and unnatural) resources would be around them, including some that you haven't seen yet. We did fudge a little, but we're placing this about 300 years in the future, so things are not going to be exactly how they are now. We know exactly what resources they have, we know exactly where this is - there's a limited space that had everything we want them to be able to get as well as mine fires, and is in a reasonable walking distance from where we placed Twelve. You can probably figure out where this is if you start looking around.

FanficAllergy is offering to write a drabble for the first logged-in person who guesses the closest town to where we placed this. You'll see resources they have access to through various chapters and authors' notes. Have fun guessing! We'll announce the winner in upcoming authors' notes.

Things We Randomized:

- Weather
- How far they traveled each day
- Hunting/Gathering
- Layout of the Cave and what was in it (yes, the water seep and the smoke hole were randomized)
- Bad caves along the way - how many, when, why they were bad
- What items they found in the cave and whether they were usable

So that's it for this arc!

Coming next… Interlude: Rebel in a Blue Dress - AKA: Meanwhile, back in District Twelve.

Coming soon… Arc Two: Brand New Breeze - They've found a place to live, but that doesn't mean everything is smooth sailing. Katniss has two men in love with her, what's an emotionally constipated teenager gonna do?

Let us know what you think!