AN: Sorry for the long time between updates. Writer's block.
"That was foolish," Stara says, sheathing the knife. "I could have been a career."
Morning has broken a long time ago; I realized I must have been asleep for 9 hours or more. I feel a stab of guilt for letting Thresh down. He is sitting on the ground, glaring off into the distance, but I know that it's directed at me. "Uh," I answer lamely, because she is, of course, right. "I was really tired and recovering from dehydration."
"Well there's no point talking about it anymore. I've been looking for you since the bloodbath. I thought you'd go toward the area with trees; that's where Rue and Katniss went. The careers have a base at the cornucopia with all their supplies. And Katniss's lover is with them. I managed to sneak into the career camp and take a bit of food last night. It's not a lot but it's something and we need to live somehow."
She opens up a small backpack to reveal a few strips of beef, some broken pieces of cracker and a half loaf of bread. The backpack also has three medium-sized water bottles, which will be invaluable if we plan to travel. "Not much," she says, "but I couldn't risk more. The girl from 2 was on guard and she's sharp as a hawk. It looks like they rotate guards, one each night."
Hungrily I rip into the small ration. It's the first thing I've eaten since the games began, and now that my thirst has been quenched, my hunger makes itself felt anew. We gather some water and purify it for Stara, who gulps it down thirstily. "We only found that water late last night," I say. "We walked the whole day to get to it."
"Who found you," Star asks after she finishes the water. "She points to the bandage.
"Group of fox mutts," I say carelessly. "Easy kills."
"Yeah, and that bandage is only for show."
"Ok, not easy kills then. How far are we from the career camp? We've been wandering around willy-nilly for a day and a half and I've kind of lost my bearings a bit. That field of grasses seemed to go on forever."
"Well it took me 4 or 5 hours to walk from the career camp to here," she says. "You might want to hide better. I think Katniss is sleeping high in a tree every night now. That's smarter than snoozing on the ground. The careers could just stomp all over you."
"It's hard to climb with my limp," I say. I try to keep my face blank, but it's difficult to hide my sadness as I think about losing Old Boone all over again. Stara seems to notice my wavering composure; she quickly changes the subject and smiles apologetically at me.
"So, what now," she asks. "Is there any reason to stay here? I know we have easy access to water, but this stream seems to follow the path to the wheat field also."
"We probably should move," I say. "There's no food and it's way too dangerous and time-consuming for you to trek over to the career camp to steal some. There has to be other stuff around. I know we're at least close to animals. We could hunt them or something."
The other two nod and we all stand, arming ourselves and stretching the aches out of our limbs. The sun has not reached its zenith but is still powerful enough to be uncomfortably hot. It's a good thing that I found water yesterday. It will probably get much worse as the day goes on.
Food is much harder to get than I had predicted. I see a small rabbit browsing on the local plant life near me and charge at it with my spear. With a dainty leap, it dodges out of the way and scurries off. That was not the first time today either. Annoyed, I stab my spear into the ground, dirtying the shaft as I extract it. Now I'll have to clean it as well. The others walk stolidly along beside me, their faces set in hard lines. They probably just shrugged it off as routine, while the anger at the futility of hunting boils inside me. I can just barely resist hitting Thresh so that I can fight with him to blow off some steam. He'd probably kill me anyway.
We reach the wheat field late in the afternoon and drop our equipment at its edge in the shade of a few slender aspens. They will provide precious little respite from the sun, but it's still a welcome relief after the grueling heat. We're also running low on water, but the stream isn't too far away so we should be fine on that account, as long as we don't have to move. Stara goes off to try hunting some of the local animals. I doubt she'll be successful, but I keep that thought to myself. Then again she's faster than me. Thresh goes toward the wheat field to see if the wheat is able to be harvested. Having nothing better to do, I stay to guard our meager supplies.
Stara comes back to the sparse camp, empty-handed as I expected. "Well at least I've set up some basic snares," she says. "I tried to catch a few rabbits but they're more alert than I realized. They can hear my heart beating, I'm sure of it. Even when I stood perfectly still they heard me and dodged my throwing knives. But maybe the snares will work. I hope they do. Anything interesting happen here?"
"Nope," I say dismissively. "Nothing at all. Maybe we missed the cannons. we might as well be alone here."
"Good one," she says, slapping my arm. "Where'd you learn to make people laugh? I don't think it was the cows."
"Nah, it was Hefra," I say.
"My mother," I explain as she glances questioningly at me. "She was always hating on the cows I loved the most and saying that they were only good for slaughtering to make fresh beef. And whenever something wrong happened, it was my fault. She drops some dishes while cooking? Maybe if I hadn't been there she could have concentrated better because I was agitating the animals, that were far away in the barn, I might add. An old trough is eaten by termites? I must have enticed them there. Because I have always just been an excuse for her and Garbull, my father, to spend even more money than they have to. To hear her talk about it we were dirt poor, worse off than the homeless."
"That's despicable," Stara says. She moves her hand tentatively toward my back. Then after a bit of hesitation, she pats it awkwardly. "I' really sorry for making you relive that."
"I do it every day," I say with a shrug. It's weird, but I enjoy the warm feeling of her hand upon my back. In companionable silence, we sit together. I hope that Thresh has had some success in harvesting.
Thump! A bulky bundle of harvested wheat crashes into us from above. We are forced to separate by the wheat bundle, which Thresh quickly picks up and begins to unravel. "New friend, Dal," he says. He keeps his face hard, but I can hear the smile that he is concealing for the cameras.
"I suppose so," I say, smiling in spite of myself. Stara just turns away from us. That red mane of hair is strikingly beautiful in the fading light of the sun. As Thresh begins to prepare some bread, using the fire starting technique I showed him last night, I can't take my eyes off of Stara's hair. As the sun traverses the sky, moving slowly westward, the hue of her hair continuously changes. I have never seen anything like it, except perhaps when I first saw carefree wildlife, and the last of Old Boone in the flesh.
I bet the cameras are trained on me. I realize I've probably been staring at Stara for a full fifteen minutes or more without stopping. Thresh is baking our meal, seemingly oblivious to everything, though I know that he knows. As I breathe in the fresh air, I recognize the smell of fresh bread for the first time. It's just beginning to rise under Thresh's expert watch, and it looks filling, unlike our meager teseree rations from District 10.
"What a weird subversion of gender roles," I say to Stara with a slight grin. "You go out hunting and Thresh is cooking. Who would've thought it?"
Thresh grabs a stone and lobs it at me playfully. "You bad," he says, turning back to the bread. As his face turns away I catch a quick flash of his eye, so fleeting that I wonder if it was real. I know it was real though; that look doesn't happen by accident. After another ten minutes of agonizing waiting, the smell tantalizingly close, he deems it ready. I've never tasted bread so soft yet filling in my life.
"Not as good as I could have done," Thresh says after taking an experimental bite. "Wish I had some yeast or something."
"You kidding? I've never had bread this good," I say.
"Yeah," Stara agrees. "I almost never had freshly baked food. I rarely had fresh food period. It was all from the garbage cans, or stale. This is excellent!"
All too quickly, the bread is gone. "Gotta make the wheat last," Thresh says, "In case we don't get a chance to harvest more. You got enough in you to last a full day and no more. In 11 you get strict rations. You take more, you get whipped. Every Sunday's whipping day. Usually get a day off work on Sunday but we all have to watch the whippings. I'd almost rather be working sometimes, it lasts so long. And of course no one can leave."
It's the most I've ever heard Thresh say at once. His voice is strong, but clipped, as are his sentences, and yet I realize that under his hard exterior, he is shrewd, shrewder than I have given him credit. I quickly leave to get water, self-conscious about underestimating my allies. I realize just how sheltered my life was compared to both Thresh's and Stara's. I'm lucky, too, that they are my allies. Having them working together against me would be a nightmare.
As Stara predicted, the stream is not too far away from the field of wheat. After filling the water bottles and purifying each of them with iodine, I return to the campfire. The Capitol seal appears in the sky over our heads and the anthem plays. No faces appear in the sky today. I hope the viewers found the interplay between Stara and me interesting enough. If they didn't, the game makers will probably create some action instead. A dull Hunger Games would undermine their effectiveness, after all.
Thresh takes the first watch, as he is the most well-rested. Stara and I, weapons close at hand, lie down near the campfire, and I make sure that I am several feet away from her. The flames are slowly dwindling to smoking embers as my eyes close. The drawn-out hoot of a barn owl echoes from far in the distance, and pale moonlight illuminates the three figures by the campfire, vigilant, yet at peace.
"Get up! Get up right now," Thresh's harsh shout snaps me out of a dream where Old Boone is telling me about a new animal, a groosling, which he had just managed to kill while it was roosting. Apparently the meat was just tough enough that he could crunch it, and he really liked to crunch food. I jolt upright, my hand fumbling for my spear. I smell charred wood all around and watch the forest fire devouring trees, grass, the wheat field, everything. Stara is nowhere to be seen.