Here's Chapter Seven! Tell me what you think about it!

Rekindling

Chapter Seven

I wasn't able to get out of the grasp of the person who had me in a headlock. My arms were crushed to my side as his arm held me to him, so my bow was no good to me. I heard him breathing next to my ear and felt the sturdy, stolen uniform he was wearing against my skin as he held my head. I tried to scream, but his hand was so tight over my mouth that I could barely even breathe. He was sweating, which I could smell on his hand as I tried to get a good enough breath through my nose.

"Katniss Everdeen," he said to me, his voice deep as he tore my goggles off. "You couldn't possibly be stupid enough to be out here all alone, could you?"

And he was stupid if he thought I'd ever give up Peeta. I kicked my legs behind me, trying to hit him hard enough so that he would drop me, but I just kicked air. He pressed his head against the side of my face and held me tighter.

"Do you have anything to say before I decided what to do with you?"

He was obviously new at this, because he let his hand go from my mouth so that I could have a discussion with him, but I only let out a screech that I hoped Peeta would hear. He shook me hard, and I tried to keep my head steady, but it thrashed side to side.

"Why," I said, trying to break away from him. "Are you doing this?"

He chuckled, as if he was so amused.

"My kid sister got blown up to bits that night of the rebellion," he said, right against my ear. "That wouldn't have happened if you would have just kept to your shitty district and left us all alone."

I fought against him, jamming my elbows into his chest, but he just held me tighter, squeezing my head between his hands. I knew, from watching Cato and so many other tributes in my time in the Games that with one twist, my neck would be broken and I would be dead before I hit the ground.

"Maybe…" I started, huffing as I tried to wiggle free. "If you hadn't supported watching kids kill each other, I wouldn't have had to do it."

"Even in the last few seconds of your life, you want to be a feisty bitch," he said, his laugh rumbling against my back. "It will just make killing you more—"

I felt the warm, sticky spray of liquid burst onto the back of my head before I realized that the grip of the man who had caught me loosened. He tumbled away from me, falling to my left. From where I stood I saw the dent in his skull. I sunk to the ground, gripping the wet floor of the woods with my hands as I took it in. I could taste his blood, which dripped from the back of my head to my mouth, and I spit at the ground, hoping for the taste to disappear.

This time, it was Peeta's arms that I felt wrap around me. He guided me up to my feet and dragged me further into the woods, far away from the fence before letting me sink to the ground. The club that he used to bash my attacker's head in was coated in its own layer of blood, just like my skin.

"Get it off of me," I whispered to Peeta, wiping at my neck.

He pushed my hands away from the mess and I rested on all fours, focusing on the ground, which was only inches away from my face as I cried. I felt the splash of water on my neck, and saw even in the white light of the moon, the pinkish drips of water mixed with blood fall to the dirt around me. I heard the sound of the zippers of his backpack being opened and then he was wiping whatever remained of the man's blood from my braid and skin. He tossed the towel to the ground when he was done and gently pulled me up to look at him.

"It's just a little blood," he said to me, grabbing the towel again and wiping my cheek, which was marked with red too.

"A little?" I croaked, not able to get the feeling of the blood spraying onto me out of my memory. "You kil—"

Peeta shushed me then and hugged me as the two of us knelt on our knees in front of each other. He squeezed me as I buried my face against his shoulder and even though my neck had just been coated with blood, he held his hand there, where I knew he could feel my pulse.

Those men were the first. The first to die, the first to almost kill me. I was glad that the only thing I saw of the man who Peeta had killed was his head, not his face, not the colors he most likely still had dyed on his skin from his time in the capitol. The other one, well, I hadn't been close enough to get a good look at him before sending an arrow through his heart.

I could see my hands shaking in front of me as I held them close to my face to get a look at the blood that colored my fingers. Peeta wiped them off with the sleeve of his jacket, giving me a tiny shake so that I would look at him. I tried to focus on his face, but my adrenaline was coursing so rapidly through my body that I just wanted to lay down and wait until my head stopped spinning.

"Katniss," Peeta whispered to me, brushing my bangs out of my face with both of his hands. "It's okay."

"I killed one too," I told him, finally looking him in the eye.

"Good," Peeta said, keeping his hands on either side of my face. "Two down."

"There's only two of us, Peeta," I said, realizing our odds. "How are we going to do this?"

Peeta stood up, pulling me to my feet with him.

"The same way we won the first Games… when it was two against twenty two," Peeta said. "We just have to keep moving and outsmart everyone else."

"I want to get this over with," I told him, shivering because my wet hair pressed against my skin.

"Let's go then," he said.

Instead of walking in front of me, Peeta kept a tight grip on my hand as we walked through the woods. Without the fence as a guide, we had to hope that we were getting closer to my old hunting spot, where we'd be even closer to the group of people who hated us. The night sky was black, which I could see through the openings in the trees, and I knew it had to be early in the morning because we had been walking for a few hours already.

"Do you smell that?" I asked him after an hour or so.

I could feel the moisture in the air wetting my face and when I inhaled, I could smell water.

"No," Peeta said, looking over at me. "What is it?"

"Water," I replied, breathing deeply again. "We have to be near the stream."

The stream ran right through where Gale and I used to hunt, and where I swam on warm summer days with my dad when I was younger. The water in the air grew heavier the closer that we got, so I knew that we were almost there. The ground was especially damp around this area not only because of the rain that we had got all day, but because whenever it did rain, the water ran over the edge of the stream and flowed downhill if there was enough.

Peeta grimaced when he looked down at our feet and saw that they were covered in mud and that we were leaving a trail.

"How much further do you think we have until we get to the stream?" Peeta asked me.

"Not much further. Ten minutes," I said.

"We need to walk in the stream once we get there," he said, picking up his pace. "If they find our footprints we're done for."

"We better hurry then," I said, having to jog a little because Peeta was weaving through trees so fast.

After a minute, we were both jogging, trying our best to anticipate the low hanging branches of the newer trees, but even with my experience in these woods, I still found myself being slapped in the face with branches. Peeta slowed after a little bit and let go of my hand. He stood close to me as he listened, clearly noticing something that I hadn't while we ran.

I lifted my bow and my sense of hearing heightened as I focused on every sound around me. If we encountered even more Peacekeepers now after only a short forty five minutes since seeing the last two, then we would know how close we were. It would only be a short time before we came face to face with all of them.

Peeta reacted before I did when we saw the white uniform of someone sneaking around us behind trees. He grabbed the knives on the outside of his backpack and flung one a few yards out in front of him when the person wasn't quick enough to hop behind another tree. But even with one dead in a second, three more appeared, and then another one next to me. Instantly I pulled an arrow from my sheath and sent it to the Peacekeeper impersonator closest to me, and Peeta left my side when another one charged forward with a knife of his own waving.

Peeta blocked the blow that would have sliced him in the shoulder with his club, and the other two eyed me. In the dark, their white uniforms almost glowed, highlighting their bodies, but their faces weren't visible, which I was thankful for. I ducked behind a tree when one of them sent an arrow of their own toward me, and it stuck in the edge of the tree, crushing the bark.

I heard the scream of the Peacekeeper that Peeta was fighting when I emerged from behind the tree, pulling my bow back and doing a much better job than the one who sent an arrow at me because I hit him. He sunk to the ground and rested on his knees as the end of the arrow bobbed while the other end stayed drilled in his shoulder. A choking sound came from his lips, and I knew that if I could see his face, I'd see his eyes rolling into the back of his head.

Peeta yanked me away from the tree and dragged me back, starting to run. The only remaining fake Peacekeeper was shaking the person I had just shot, screaming his name. Apparently, I had just killed his buddy.

We didn't try to keep the branches from hitting us as we went, because all we wanted was to get away. I could hear the raged breathing of the remaining enemy and his footsteps smacking against the wet ground. Near my ear I heard something zip past me, and then saw an arrow stick in the ground to my right. Peeta tugged me harder, picking up his pace.

I heard another arrow coming our way and hoped that if it hit one of us, it'd hit our backpacks first to lessen the blow. Peeta let out a pained grunt and when I looked over at him, he was ripping an arrow away from his arms, keeping the arrow clenched in his hand so that the person running after us didn't have another arrow to shot at us.

I turned back then, knowing that the person was still far enough away from us so that he couldn't grab me, and shot an arrow in his direction. Peeta kept running, shouting my name to hurry, and I only followed him again when I heard the sound of the Peacekeeper's body hitting the ground.

By the time I was back with Peeta, the stream was in view. We heard shouting further off behind us and it took complete hope on our part to slide down the bank of the stream. I hoped as Peeta latched onto a root that was protruding from the side of the stream, that the people we heard wouldn't be able to see us.

Peeta had a good grip on me as our legs dangled in the fast moving water of the stream. I knew he was in severe pain, because I could hear him trying to hold in a moan. I squeezed my arm around his waist and gripped onto the side of the bank to maybe shift some of the burden of our weight to me. When we heard the voices that we had heard before we jumped right overhead, both of us stopped breathing. I kept my eyes trained on Peeta's and he looked intently back at me. It was the only thing distracting him from the pain of his arm and the fear of the people so close to us.

"You son of a bitch!" one of the voices said, his voice angry. "There's two of them and they've already killed six of us! How do you think that makes us look?!"

"Stupid," Peeta whispered.

I glared at him because it was stupid of him to try to lighten the mood in this moment when he could easily give us away. He leaned his head against the bank of the stream, pressing himself closer to the mud.

"Flickerman is going to kills us if we come back with this news!" the voice said.

"It's not our fault!" a new voice said. "We'll just lie and tell him we couldn't find them."

At the sound of Caesar's name, I was instantly angry. Never in a million years would I have believed that Caesar Flickerman would stage a war to get us killed after all of this time. He always seemed so ready to help Peeta and me out while interviewing in front of the Capitol. Now, he was as bad as President Snow, and that didn't go over well with me.

The voices faded eventually, and after a few minutes we didn't hear them at all. The only noises were from the animals roaming around in the night. Peeta moved uncomfortably next to me and since for the moment it felt safe, I let him talk when he did.

"I can't hang onto this anymore, Katniss," he said. "My arm."

The moonlight that reflected on the water gave me a good source of light to look at his arm, which in one spot was a tangle of skin and fabric from his jacket.

"Let go then," I said to him.

He started to say something, maybe about how he hadn't been in water since the second Games and that wasn't exactly a good time for him in terms of getting good swimming lessons. I reached to the back of his backpack and pulled a short string just behind his head and different sections of the backpack inflated that would keep him afloat. The instant he heard the air fill inside of the backpack, he let go of the root and we both slid the rest of the way into the rain filled stream. I kicked my legs underneath me to keep myself above water until Peeta pulled the same string on my backpack.

"How'd you know there was one of these in here?" Peeta whispered to me, floating in front of me.

"Haymitch had to think of everything," I replied. "Cover our weaknesses."

The water was cold against my exposed skin, but my clothes did a good job at keeping my body heat in.

"He knows more than he let on, doesn't he?" Peeta asked me.

Since going to his house to collect supplies, I had been trying not to get my hopes up about Haymitch knowing what we were doing. I figured that it would be easier if he did. I didn't believe he had these backpacks packed and was okay with watching the kids because he thought we were just going out for the night. He knew that we were into something bad, whether he admitted it or not.

"I hope so," I said to Peeta. "Maybe he'll be more help than we think."

Peeta nodded, but I could tell there was something else he was thinking about.

"That TV was weird, don't you think?"

"What?" I whispered, wondering what he meant.

"Haymitch's TV. The new one we saw when we came into his house."

I forgot completely about the TV since after seeing it, a lot more things had taken precedent over it.

"Haymitch doesn't like TV," Peeta said, starting to try to come up with an explanation for it. "So why would he have it?"

I waved my hands under the water and let the water run between my fingers as I thought of a reason for Haymitch's TV. In the Games, the only time Haymitch paid any attention to it, was when Caesar Flickerman was presenting information about the Games, whether about our training scores or adding commentary about us while we fought in the Games.

"He's been watching Caesar Flickerman," I said, my eyes widening at the realization. "He knows everything."

"You don't think Effie…" Peeta trailed off as we both put everything together.

Of course, Effie had to have sent some kind of hidden message with her wigs after she staged her death. Otherwise, under the influence of alcohol, Haymitch would have been completely oblivious to anything going on around him. He has been getting messages from Effie before even Gale. He knew we were coming yesterday to ask for his help.

As we floated in the water, letting everything sink in, I couldn't help but wonder why Haymitch was still devoting his life to saving me and Peeta. I started to wonder something I could never say out loud to Peeta, something that Haymitch always considered during the Games. I had to wonder about which one of us Haymitch was hoping would come back. And who, if not both of us, he was working to save.

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unknownbyhim22