Hey! Yes, I am finally back after the Christmas rush…sorry if this is a bit of a late update, and I do feel guilty because so many of you have asked me to update sooner…sorry to those people! I hope all of you had a merry, merry Christmas and a happy New Year! Cheers to a great 2012!

Anyway, I think the last update got the most reviews, and for that I also thank you! It's nice to feel appreciated :).

Also, this might be the last update for a while. With exams coming up and stuff, I'm going to be really busy. But you never know, I might just have time.

SO without further ado, the next chapter!

After Mockingjay

Chapter Eight: The Chase

It seems, after even the slightest happiness I receive, I never get to enjoy it for very long. Evil sweeps down like an ugly bird, snatching away any chances I have at peace. It's an endless, repeating cycle, unforgiving and terrifying.

It would be an understatement to say that the wedding ended in chaos. After the shots finally ceased, there was a moment of silence where I could only hear my heart, and Peeta's beating furiously and uneven on top of mine. Faint screams started to echo through the air, but they seemed distant.

And then people were touching us, pulling us apart. I grappled to reach Peeta, but the arms were too strong. That was the only part that was as hazy as the beginning of the chaos. I remember struggling, and then a calm voice speaking in my ear: "It's going to be okay Katniss. We're trying to help you."

Madge. Now, I realize that she was indeed trying to help me, as well as Gale, who swept me up in his arms and carried me through the halls of the peacekeeper building. I think I might have blacked out a couple times before Gale had set me down in a soft chair in what must have been the head Peacekeeper's office. Sometime later Haymitch arrived, who quickly delved into what had happened. I listened with rapt attention.

Haymitch explained that the attackers were anti-rebel citizens, who were against the revolution the Mockingjay had created. They thought that if they killed the source of the revolution – meaning Peeta and I – they could start another war, and take over the Capitol again. It would mean that the Districts would become slaves again; and the Hunger Games would start again.

The verdict: we are being hunted.

Thankfully, they hadn't succeeded. Yet. I would live. The bullet had just grazed my arm, thankfully not cutting through any major arteries in the process. Peeta, thankfully, escaped unscathed.

My mother stiches up the wound in our kitchen while Gale explains the rest. I couldn't really remember the trip back to Victor`s Village, but everything that had been told to me had been remembered.

Gale explains that a witness saw the anti-rebels fleeing towards the forest that surrounds District 12. An attack force is being set up, made of all of the rebels that helped take down the Capitol and more some. He says that Peeta and I will be a part of this infiltration of the anti-rebel base, which is somewhere in the meadow.

And that's why I'm standing next to where the gates dissecting the forest from the district were before they were torn down almost a year ago. I'm dressed in something similar to what I wore when we infiltrated the Capitol, and my bow is hanging off of my fingers. My arm throbs every time I shift it slightly, thanks to the wound the bullet made, but I tell no one about my pain.

And even though I want to do this, I'm shaking on the inside.

Peeta stands next to me. Just the image of him standing there, with a riffle in his hands reminds me of the darker days, when he had been hijacked. When the last time he held a gun, I feared for my own life.

But he just shoots me a reassuring smile, one that says, "It'll be fine. We're safe."

I try to mirror his smile, but can't muster up the will.

Gale is at the front of the pack, handing out orders. There are fifty of us in total, against who-knows how many anti-rebels. All of them are carrying weapons. Several people hold dogs attached to long leashes. For a moment, I wonder if they are mutts, and if their sense of smell has been heightened by that or not. If so, they don't look any different from regular dogs.

We finally get our order: Stay in the middle of the pack, wait for the signal when we find the anti-rebels, and then move in the flush them out. But always remain in the middle, away from the real danger. We are still too valuable.

We wait as scouts go into the meadow, taking the dogs with them as they scan the underbrush and search for anything that might tip them off. I sway on my feet, and lean into Peeta a bit. I only had four hours of sleep, and most of it was the lucid place between dreaming and waking caused by painkillers. I imagine myself somewhere in the forest, sleeping in a tree like I had in the Hunger Games, always wary of everything around me. It felt like that now, like at any moment I would hear another gunshot, and that would be it.

"You don't have to do this, you know," Peeta says to me, wrapping an arm around my side.

"You don't have to either," I say, stifling a yawn in my throat. "I have to. What do you think people will say if I don't? 'They're scared. They're not really part of the revolution; they get others to fight their battles for them.'" I pretend that I'm reading a newspaper in front of me.

"Katniss," Peeta says evenly, a bit of weariness in his tone. "Everything we do is not being recorded, or taken into bad light. This is the last step before we can enjoy our married life together."

I know he means the last part as a bit of a tease. It makes me smile anyways, even if that smile is weak and tired. "Let's just get this over with. Then you can give me a foot massage."

He smirks, but what he was going to say next is lost by the static call of a scouter's voice coming through on Gale's radio. "We found something!"

"Okay everybody!" Gale says, and motions for all of us to follow him. I spare one last glance at Peeta before we're moving through the forest.

We only have to go a little bit into the forest, before we reach the scouter and his dog. The dog is sniffing and barking at the ground near the scouter's feet, where I can see is a small trapdoor, partially hidden by leaves and branches. I wonder for a moment whether Gale and I could have been standing right on top of this thing the last time we were in here together, and whether they knew if I was there.

I lose sight of the trapdoor as more people crowd around Peeta and I. My fingers clench around my bow when I hear a creaking sound, and Peeta offers me a squeeze of his hand before we're off.

Surprisingly, the others move down the trapdoor fast. In a matter of seconds, I'm climbing a rusty ladder down into packed earth, and jumping down onto compressed dirt. I stand up, my arm aching. But I have no time to rest before I'm being forced on.

When I look around and see the curved, sweeping walls on either side of me, I realize that the anti-rebels had constructed a series of earthen tunnels underneath the forest floor.

With no time to dwindle, I move forwards with Peeta not far behind. The first tunnel is wide; bow strung and ready, I make it halfway down before I see a human being – not one of our own – on the ground, a hole spurting blood in his chest. For a moment I have the crazed urge to wonder if maybe we were wrong, and these are just innocent people – before I see the insignia on his jacket: a mockingjay, like the pin I had, with a strike through it.

Peeta shifts me along, past the person. I swallow the nausea building inside of me and continue.

Suddenly, there are shouts up ahead, followed by multiple blasts of gunfire where the first wave went in. Peeta stops me in my tracks as we listen, hearing people shout; "Intruders! Intruders!" And then more gunfire.

"Come on," Gale is behind us now. "Keep going."

We do. The next tunnel splits into two ways. Gale moves in front and picks the right one, the one that doesn't have the echo of gunfire flowing through the dirt-packed walls.

This tunnel ascends up a carefully crafted staircase, and then splits off into four ways. They're trying to confuse us, I think to myself.

A couple of dogs are brought forth, and they each sniff a tunnel. Two of them earn barks; the far left, and the middle right.

"We're going to split into four groups," Gale says. He starts by telling people which tunnel they're going in; ten people for each of the tunnels that must have people down them, and five each for the others that don't seen much of a threat. Me: The far right. Peeta: The middle left.

At first, I start to panic because I don't want to be separated from Peeta. I'm afraid that I'm going to have a panic attack, before I realize that Gale only did this because he feels as though there is no threat in those tunnels, and that we're more safer that way. For my sake, and everyone else's, I hope he's right.

"Make sure you don't get lost!" Gale calls out to everyone. "Mark your tunnel. We'll meet back here in twenty minutes if we find something."

We split up. My group follows me as we start to walk down the tunnel. The sounds of everyone else are cut off, replaced with shuffle of five sets of footsteps as we make our way deeper into the anti-rebel base.

Suddenly, the ground starts to slope downwards. I stop at the top of the descent for a moment, my head almost brushing the ceiling. "Mark off this tunnel," I tell a man from my group. He nods, marks off a space on the wall with a deep indent, and we start to move again.

Time crawls away from me as I descend the tunnel, trying not to let my feet get swept out from under me by the steepness of the ground. I hook my bow across my elbow, and balance myself against the two walls as I walk. Soon, the walls begin to narrow, and I'm hit with a sudden bout of claustrophobia. I have the sudden image of the tunnels collapsing on us, and burying us here forever. I shake the image out of my head quickly, my fear escalating. Finally, the tunnel widens again, and splits into two.

I sigh. If Gale hadn't instructed us to mark our ways, then we would surely be lost in this tunnel. But now I'm faced with a decision; what do we do now?

"Um…do you want to split up again?" I ask, as if it's as simple as asking what kind of sweet they would like.

"I think that's a good idea," a women pipes up. "If we find anything, we can just meet back here in five minutes."

That would work – the only problem is that Gale expects us back in less than ten minutes, and even if we did find something we wouldn't have time to check it out. But it's the only plan we have, so I agree with it.

The women who suggested it and I go off as a team; the other three go off in the other tunnel. I wonder if this is what they had planned to do, I think. If they wanted to divide us, to dilute us until we're outnumbered, and then attack.

But there's no use now. The other team has disappeared from sight down the other tunnel. I follow the other women down the second tunnel. We walk for a while in silence, and I imagine what we would find on the other side. A secret base? I wonder and wonder until we come upon a solid wall – a dead end.

"Damn," I mutter, and turn around. "Let's go back."

She nods, and we turn back. The other group is there when we return, all of them shaking their heads. "We just found a room," one of them says. "With boxes in it. We didn't want to touch them."

Wanting to say that defeats the purpose, I just shrug and suggest that we return. They all comply. We begin to follow our marked paths down the tunnels again.

Suddenly, a yell echoes through the ground. Then ringing shots, like small explosions after the shout. I start to panic and move faster. Not because it sounds like they're coming from behind us, but because I have sudden mental images of Peeta getting maimed, shot, or worse.

By the time I careen out of our tunnel, I'm running. I see Gale with another group where we started.

"Where is Peeta?" I ask, my voice rising to a shout over the chaos. People have started to panic, and it must take all their will not to run in the other direction. "Where is he?"

"I don't know!" Gale shouts back. He's panting, looking around.

Another round of gunshots echo, this time down the tunnel that Peeta had gone through. Gale realizes this the same time as I do, and before he can do anything I whirl around and start sprinting down the tunnel.

"Katniss!" Gale yells after me. But I don't care. All I can see is Peeta, on the ground, bleeding. I see him being tortured, even though I know that it's irrational. They have no reason to torture him. A bullet through the head would do the job just as efficiently. Cleaner. Easier.

The breath is puffing in an out of my chest as I run, trying to follow the noises through every tunnel, and only stopping once or twice to listen. The tension builds, and I burst through a tunnel with my arrow nocked, ready to shoot.

The tunnel opens up to a makeshift room. People are everywhere; shooting, fighting, running. I watch as someone drops to the ground in a spray of red.

Then survival mode kicks in. I see a man with the same insignia on his chest as the first person in the tunnels. He's pointing a gun at someone on our side, and I release my arrow before his finger even twitches. The shot goes in cleanly, and he dies in an instant.

I throw myself into the chaos, looking for Peeta among all of the people. I know he is here. I can feel it, in my heart. The question is whether he's still alive or not.

I dodge around a person on my side, and take out another person. My pulse is racing, and my head is pounding with adrenaline. I can't let them hurt him. I can't let them hurt him. I can't let them-

I burst into another room, this one larger. And then I see them. Peeta and another anti-rebel, knives flashing. Stunned, I see a flash of red. Peeta's blood.

For a moment everything goes still as I see the scarlet arc through the air. Then I scream, and let the arrow fly into the anti-rebel's skull.

He collapses. I am breathing hard, my chest heaving. All I can see is red, red, red.

I don't know how my feet move, but soon I'm close to Peeta, clutching onto his arm as if it was the only thing that could hold me up. The blood only came from a small wound on his other arm, thankfully. But that still doesn't stop the rushing in my head. And it doesn't help the fact that there are dozens of people fighting in here, half of whom would be trying to kill us any second now.

Then there's Gale, who comes flying to the room, an array of throwing knives glittering in his hands. "Go!" He shouts, and then throws a couple of the serrated blades.

Peeta pulls on my arm, trying to get me to move. I am slow on the uptake. I don't want to lose Gale either.

"Just go!" He repeats. "I'll be fine!"

It'll be fine. Almost the same thing Peeta said when we had entered the tunnels.

I open my mouth to object, knowing that this is not the appropriate time to do so, before Peeta yanks me off my feet. "Come on!"

I know he's not being cruel. He just wants to get me out of there as soon as possible.

He half carries me through the tunnels, through the shafts of blackness and into the main entrance before I'm hitting at him, telling him to stop. "Wait!" I yell.

He looks down at me. A mix of crushing concern and fear reflect on his features. But it's not fear at our situation. It is fear of me. I wonder what he thought, when I sent that arrow through the anti-rebel's head without a shred of remorse. Is he scared that I'll start screaming, like I did moments before? I am scared. For that moment, I'm scared of myself, and what I'm capable of doing.

"Okay," Peeta says. "We'll wait."

So we do.