Chapter 3: Training

"Remember, Catnip: today is about making allies…."

I almost want to laugh at my husband's instructions, given how I know Gale wants to follow Haymitch's orders about as much as I do, which is to say not at all.

Our lack of enthusiasm for winning friends and influencing people is justified the moment we walk into the Training Center…. and just in time to walk in on the alcoholic man from District 5 throwing up the breakfast we definitely drank all over the mats.

I wince. "So far, I'm not overwhelmed by our choices, dear."

Gale is grimacing through a chuckle. "Well, let's try to reconnoiter who we trust the least and work our way backwards from there."

I lift a prissy eyebrow. "You don't trust anybody!"

"I trust you," Gale points out, rather self-evidently, though he elicits a smile from me when he lifts my knuckles to his lips and kisses them. "I trust you with my life."

I smirk. "Lawfully wedded spouses don't count."

"All right, all right…." Gale scans the room. Less than half of the Reaped Victors are even here and it's nearly top of the hour. I wonder if some of them, particularly the geriatrics, won't even bother to show up at all. From what I can see, most of the men are huddled together down at the spear-throwing range: Brutus, Finnick, and Chaff, as well as the men from Nine and Ten. Gale nods to the group. "I think I'll start over there."

"For a little guy talk?" I smirk. In all the years I have known him, it occurs to me that Gale probably has only one guy friend who isn't related to him: that would be Thom Borden, son of the Miner Foreman back home. "Want to get into a pissing contest around comparing sizes?"

Gale nearly chokes and swivels his head to stare at me, which only makes me laugh. "Actually, I was thinking of punching Odair and Chaff's lights out for making moves on my wife."

I shake my head. "I think you've proven yourself to be enough of a rabble-rouser in Training already." Last summer, Marvel, the boy from 1, had tried to put his hands on me and Gale had lit into him to defend my honor, stirring up bad blood with the Careers early. Training attendants had needed to break it up: no fighting with the other tributes before the arena. Ironclad rule.

I grin and shoo my lover away. "Go on. Go do your he-man locker room talk."

Gale stoops and pecks me on the lips soundly before strutting off. He at least seems to be welcomed warmly by some of the other men in the group, even Brutus, which surprises me. I wonder if Brutus mentored Cato, or would have known him.

Other Victors are beginning to trickle in behind me. I wait for Atala, our Head Trainer, to call the room to order, but nothing happens. We're all veterans; she must figure we know our way around the room.

I browse from station to station. The snare-setting attendant remembers both Gale and me fondly from last year, and shows me a few truly complex trapping devices that we never even thought to cover in our informal training back in the district. I don't tarry long, moving on to the hammock weaving station (which is apparently a thing) and encountering my first fellow competitors of the day. Gloss and Cashmere, the District 1 twins are polite but cool. One of their fellow Careers, Enobaria, is sparring with an attendant and happens to look my way. She bears her…. fangs at me.

So far, the rabid pack animal from Two is running somewhere alongside that Johanna Mason slut – meaning, dead last - in the race to see who will be my ally and, all cordialities aside, the pretty Ones are not running that far ahead. But I don't think I needed to weave hammocks or stare daggers across a crowded room to tell me that.

I meet up with the Tributes from Three at the fire starting station. They're having a bit of trouble, though the man, Beetee, is muttering to himself something about how heat creates friction.

"You should move your hands lower," I suggest, and even demonstrate. Beetee and Wiress share a glance, but he tries it and a spark flares to life.

"A little brute force…"

"…. Is always helpful!" Beetee finishes his district partner's sentence. He turns to me with a grateful smile. "Thank you…."

The pair then get distracted by the Gamemakers walking in via the balcony above, no doubt to observe our progress. "See it?"

"See what?" I ask Beetee.

"…. By the corner of the table…." Wiress murmurs.

Beetee lifts his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "Ah, yes…. The shimmering…." I suddenly feel his hand grip my chin as he nudges me and thus my line of sight. "Look…. there…."

That's when I see it: a ripple. "Forcefield. Next to Plutarch?" I recall meeting the portly Head Gamemaker at Gale's and my Victory Banquet in the Capitol last winter.

"No, in front of him," Wiress mutters.

I hiss. "Probably my fault; I shot an arrow at them last year."

"To separate us and them," Wiress quips, the phrase and random blip of thought.

"How can you tell?"

Beetee and Wiress burst out laughing. I hope it's not at my expense. "Is it that obvious or something?"

"They…. They might as well have a sign!" Wiress blasts.

"Look around you: on occasion you'll see it in the lights, they flicker. Why?"

I was never much of a science student, and I flunked my Mining Safety elective – ironic, seeing as, if I had never been Reaped, I would have more than likely married and been wife to a coal miner, like my mother before me. I may not be scientific, but I am logical, enough to guess, "Because the forcefield is taking up too much energy."

Beetee's eyes twinkle. "There's always a flaw in the system…."

I am still turning over this cryptic statement in my head as I move on towards the knot tying station….

…. and while I may not know what it means, I decide if Gale and I have to have allies, I want those two on my team.

Mags, the old lady from Four, sidles up to me at the next station. I'm impressed to find her down here, considering her age.

But I'm even more impressed by how:

"That was very brave what you did, volunteering for that girl."

Mags shakes her head and signs something to me that I can't interpret. I wonder if at some point, she had a stroke. Mother and Prim have diagnosed neurological ailments like that all the time, mostly in retired miners who managed to survive the shafts and are living out their last days on a meager pension.

My attention thus drawn to Mags' hands, I come to realize the woman can make a fishhook out of literally anything. I grin. "If…. if you taught me to fish like that, I could teach you how to hunt."

She gummily grins, pleased.

I want her on my team, too. I want her bad, to hell with how old she is!

Great. Now Haymitch and Gale will have to hear how I want a couple of nerds and a little old lady watching our six against the Careers. I bet they'll both just love that.

When it comes time to hold up my end of the bargain, I bring Mags to the archery range. It's sealed off with glass this year, and is using far fancier tech than what I saw Glimmer practicing with a year ago. Pixelated fighters are rendered and converge on me from all sides. I fell one, then another, until I get lost in the shooting.

So lost, that it doesn't dawn on me for a time that I can hear every pixel coming apart with my shots.

I turn and realize that I have drawn quite the audience – over half the field in fact. Mags is applauding, enraptured. Most of the Careers are frowning with hard sets to their jaws. Gale is smirking, proud as punch with me. I see him lean in and mouth something to Finnick and the man from Nine. 'That's my wife.'

By the time we return to the penthouse floor, Haymitch nearly attacks us both. "So at least half the Victors want to take your double act on the road with them, and by that I don't mean the circus. I know it can't be because you two have suddenly shed your awkward introverts routine."

"They saw Katniss shoot," Gale grins at me warmly. "If I wasn't legally wed to the little lady, I'd have you put in a formal request myself, old man."

"You're that good?" Haymitch ogles me. "So good that Brutus wants to recruit you?"

I chance a glance at Gale and catch his expression: from how it roils, it appears he didn't get enough warm feelings from the middle-aged man from Two to wanna go slumming with him in the arena. "But I don't want Brutus," I state. "I want Mags and District 3."

"Of course you do!" Haymitch throws up his hands, muttering to himself. "Mags and District 3…."

"Johanna calls them Nuts and Volts."

"I can think of a few choice nicknames for her, several of which start with 'S'," I fold my arms, scowling. "And since when have you been talking to her?"

"Since she called me over by the wrestling ring this afternoon," Gale shrugs. Noticing how the dark storm clouds on my face haven't abated, he smirks. "Why, Catnip…. Don't tell me you're jealous!..."

Considering we shared our first kiss as the result of an argument around me being jealous of another girl, this playful joke should land. It doesn't. I just let out a kind of growl more befitting a mutt and stamp my feet before marching off to our room, nose in the air.

Gale is wise enough to not touch me in bed that night, much less mount me. I fall asleep with my back to him.

Gale invites me over to where some of his new buddies have pushed tables together during lunch. Chaff tells really bawdy jokes that nobody gets, but at least he doesn't try to kiss me again. Still, there's one more person who is in the hard 'No' pile of possible allies. Though I do tentatively place his district partner, Seeder – in my small shortlist of possible 'Yes'es.

4 Yeses. Six Hell Nos. Only…. Thirteen more to sift through.

The Morphlings from Six are trying to get a mini food fight going as they paint each other's cheeks with mashed potatoes. I grimace. OK, make that eleven.

On the last day of training, we all are held in a holding room to await our private sessions with the Gamemakers. Gale and I don't speak, preferring to let me nearly fall asleep on his shoulder, until Chaff has finally been called in and my husband and I are left alone.

I don't want to murder again. I don't want to hate these other Victors, or make enemies of them. Some of these folks I even like. Still others, it would be downright cruel to even raise a hand against them – like that Woof, elderly to the point that he no longer seems to realize what is going on or where he is or why he's there.

"How are we going to kill these people, Gale?"

"Depends on the person," he analyzes clinically. "Ruthlessly in some cases, mercifully in others." Meeting my eyes when I lift my head to stare at him, we both are transported back to a conversation we had soon after being Reaped last summer, in which we had wondered whether killing a fellow human being would feel the same as killing an animal.

How different can it be, really? Gale had postulated then.

I'd had hoped that, after surviving an entire arena with me, the love of his life, he would by now have learned better: killing another person versus killing an animal is worlds-apart different.

"Katniss Everdeen:" There is an awkward pause. "Katniss Everdeen Hawthorne, excuse me: please report for individual assessment." Cupping Gale's cheek, I turn his face to mine and kiss his lips chastely.

"See you upstairs after," he rumbles.

I march inside, whereupon I am given ten minutes to present my chosen skill.

I don't know why, but it is now that I allow the anger I have been bottling up over his injustice to boil over, and I raid the paint station – or what's left of it after the Six Morphlings had their fill – before seizing a practice dummy and some rope.

It takes at least a couple of my allotted minutes to rig the thing from the rafters, but by the time I have bowed and shown myself out, I have hung Seneca Crane, the previous Head Gamemaker, in effigy.

Gale is a long time returning, and I wait up for him. I want to pester him about what he did, if he saw what I did, but my husband doesn't bring it up, so I don't ask.

Haymitch is quieter than usual at dinner, almost like he is avoiding us, his charges. I try to put it out of my head as we sit down to watch the Training Score returns.

Cashmere and Gloss tie each other with 10s, amping up the stakes to their sibling rivalry. Brutus gains the first 11 of the night, which Finnick later matches. Enobaria nets a 9. Wiress and Beetee earn 6s and 8s, respectively. Nolan, Roan and Chaff, the men from Districts 9 through 11, are in the hunt with 7s. Johanna Mason gets a 9, which displeases me. Low to medium for the rest, with Woof landing in the basement at a pathetic 1.

I have no idea how Gale and I will play, but when our names are called, my husband and I make Hunger Games history: unprecedented scores of 12, edging all of the Careers.

"Why would they do that?" Gale marvels, eyes huge.

There is a clatter as Haymitch angrily hurls the television remote so that it goes skittering across the coffee table. "Are you really that thick, boy? They did that so the others will know to target you!" Our mentor practically has steam coming out of his ears, and I just know he learned about my stunt, somehow. "Go to bed – separate beds!"

Gale hotly leaps to his feet. "Katniss and I are married! We share a bed!"

"Not tonight, you don't!" Haymitch thunders.

Gale fumes. "Fine. Then we won't have allies." He must think this is a good counter, except Haymitch screams:

"Good! Then I won't be responsible for you killing any of my friends with your STUPIDITY!"

I gently brush a palm along Gale's shoulder, even reach up to kiss him in full view of Haymitch, if only to make a point. Then I pad down the hall to the room that was designated mine but has up until now been left unused.

Drifting off to sleep, I suddenly feel regret at having held out on Gale, stiffing him, the night before.