Peeta's Games - Chapter 14 - igsygrace - Hunger Games Trilogy (2023)

Chapter Text

Chapter Thirteen

The anthem sounds in the sky as Cato hunches by the fire, taking the first watch by himself. Almost as if he's read my mind, he has set Glimmer to watch last. My latest plan is to kill her and then kill Cato - in his sleep, hopefully. Then flee, hoping Clove and Marvel both pursue me, in the heat of the moment. Neither of them will have use for the bow; it will be left behind for Katniss. There are a lot of unpleasant variables to this plan, but I'm pretty much out of options. By the time morning comes, Cato will have come up with some plan to get Katniss down, so the confrontation will need to happen at dawn.

There are no pictures in the sky tonight, but tomorrow night, mine will be.

Tonight, I have to let go of my life and steel myself to do the thing I never thought I would do - kill in cold blood.

Are you, are you
Coming to the tree
Where the dead man called out for his love to flee
Strange things did happen here
No stranger would it be
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree

The tune winds its way through and buries itself inside my head, repeating over and over. As the night grows colder and my blood chills, I imagine there are things hanging from the boughs of the trees. Death is pressing in around me. It's as if I'm breathing its ashy breath. The glint of the weapons as they glow in the light of the fire. Blood on my hands. The dead man, singing and singing. The girl, starving and starving. The curiosity – strangely detached – about how and when it will come to me. Cato's sword? Clove's knives? Even Bet could, reasonably enough, turn on me when the time comes. Will it hurt? Will it take a long time? Or will it happen in an instant – one moment light, one moment … nothing.

Yes, I'm attempting to defend this girl, whose life has somehow come to mean more than my own fear of pain, and now even of death - but the thought of delivering the blows - plunging my knife into the unwary girl's chest, slicing the throat of a sleeping boy - is so horrifying that my mind keeps trying to retreat from it. All my sporadic resentment of this situation – this thing where I'm sacrificing myself for this girl who has no clue about it, for the boy who waits at home for her – returns to choke me. But I can't let it.

This whole thing is fucked. And the worst thing? That I didn't realize how fucked it was, not really - not until now. I've watched the Games every year - watched and hated them. Watched and hated the Careers, like we're conditioned to do, as if it is District 2's fault that we are forced into the arena. It's not even District 13's fault, as the Capitol has said, claiming to wash its hands of it all. We're just following the treaty, obeying the law. Bullshit.

Watched the District 12 children die, year after year - the ones who don't come back to school the following year. We're used to it. Like we're used to the empty desks of the children who starve to death. It's just our life, our entire life. Our entire life is an arena. It's even enclosed and I'm beginning to understand … the monsters beyond the fence, the ones that stalk the woods, the mutts and wild things - and the people who put them there? Are they truly worse than what we have become – a people who send our children to kill each other in this particularly brutal way?

I close my eyes, pretending to sleep. I make my breath sound heavier. I've pretended to sleep before. One time, the worst of the times, Ryan was in trouble and mom came into our room with a belt. I pretended to sleep through it - looking back, there's no way that anyone believed me, but it was better for me, for her, for my brother that we all agreed to pretend that I didn't witness anything.

She loathed herself after these episodes; at least, I've always had to believe this. Her father was a drunk - worse than Haymitch, probably – and to hear her tell it, he beat her nearly every night. Her brother, my uncle, is a drunk, too, and my cousins are also beat regularly - so regularly, teachers have asked me about it. For mom, these episodes were fewer and farther between, but they loom large in my memory. The last time she hit me was the day of the bread. But I was the well-behaved one in the house. My brother was the troublemaker - mimicking Peacekeepers, getting in fights at school, stealing candy once. I guess she was frightened that he would get himself executed one day and was desperate to stop him, but her approach didn't improve him.

Worse for me was her sarcastic tongue; the sort of words that ring in your head forever, long after bruises mend – that you are stupid or lazy or just not even worth the time. I've got to the point where, mostly, I let it bounce off of me. That's just her being her, I would say to myself, at the mercy of demons she couldn't conquer. It's a form of forgiveness, I guess. The only form you can give when there's no apology. Or maybe not. If I forgive her now, completely, in my heart, maybe it will make this whole thing easier for me. She was the one who showed me I could be brave enough to be defiant, even when I knew I was facing punishment. So - for that, I'm going to thank her, as well as forgive her.

I think about my father, then. His marriage is not happy - never has been - and that's not entirely mom's fault. He didn't marry the girl he wanted and, if you think about it, maybe it didn't have to be the tragedy they seem to have made of it. I have to hope there was at least something between them. After all, I'm their third child - I have to hope I came out of something other than convenience or my dad's desire to have a daughter.

Or perhaps it's enough that I seem to have been born with a purpose.

It's weird – the sense of fatalism that pervades my participation in this Game. It makes me feel more important than I really am – and also, at the same time, much, much smaller. Insignificant. A pawn in someone's game. Her volunteering and my name being called - just like that. One of only two people, maybe - eligible for the Reaping - for whom her life meant more than his own.

I think back to how she ensnared me - all those years ago. And it wasn't anything she did on purpose - it was my over-sensitive heart, really. But ever since then, though I lived and breathed and looked like a normal boy, I was bound to her in this strange and immovable way that made something like this - insane situation that I'm in now - almost inevitable. It might have ended less dramatically, with just burnt fingers, a broken heart – but it was always there, dormant, waiting for me to eventually pick it up and figure out what it was. Until I went on stage to declare it, I never really put a name to it – I never called it a crush or an infatuation or anything like that. She fascinated me, but she's a fascinating person. She was just Katniss. There were girls and there was Katniss – all in a category by herself. Always in the corner of the eye. Always my first association – the first notes of a song, the first aroma of bread when it is almost done, the first drops of rain, the first spot of color in the spring: she was in all these things.

So, it was always just a matter of time. I had this vague idea that school would end and it would just fall into place. Then she volunteered, and my name was called. As if ...

I shake off these melodramatic thoughts and take a moment to think guiltily about Bet - the girl who actually is in an alliance with me right now. Bet - who I won't kill, unless she turns on me or Katniss, first. I wish I could shake myself free of the inevitability of her eventual death. It feels like my fault, and it hasn't even happened yet. This place is fucking awful.

Clove follows Cato, and she spends her watch whistling soundlessly, practicing her knife throws. For two hours, I watch her under my narrowed eyelids, filled with anxiety. She's smarter than Cato - she must have figured out that I lied about Katniss' knowledge of the woods. And who knows what else? Hopefully, she's just not scared enough of me to bother.

Marvel follows Clove, and I relax a little. This time I just listen to the night sounds - the scurrying creatures, maybe foxes or possum? The hooting owls. I can see the stars through the netting of the trees, and just try to relax and enjoy the sight of them. Periodically, a light shoots across the sky, then vanishes. It reminds, me, oddly enough, of the Capitol.

The Capitol - a whirlwind of color and food. Nothing elegant about it. Except for Portia, so strange to me, and a little disturbing. It's impossible to reconcile that a genuinely decent person could voluntarily participate in the Games. No matter how hard I try, the math does not add up. Yet – I like her. Maybe for selfish reasons. She's the first person who ever talked to me about art and my drawings as if they actually mattered. Does that make me the shallow one – dedicated to this noble cause, as she put it, but ultimately as susceptible to flattery as anyone else?

She and Haymitch - both telling me to look after my own life, but both of them helping me to put this plan in motion to help Katniss, instead. Curiously dedicated, to the very end, to this bizarre notion that linking us together, Katniss and I, is some kind of viable winning strategy.

This thought troubles me until Marvel wakes up Glimmer to take up her watch. Then my mind flits back, in panic, to the task at hand. Glimmer stirs the fire, then sits up against a tree opposite - so she is facing me. This will make a sneak attack very difficult, I think in consternation. Nonetheless, at dawn, I must get up and kill her. All I'm going to do, from now until then, is visualize her and Cato, climbing up that tree, deliberately going after Katniss. Muttations in human form. And hope that makes it easier for me to do this thing.

But as the silvery light starts up in the sky, I notice two things simultaneously. One is that Glimmer's head has slumped over; she's asleep. Two is that there is an odd sound coming from the tall tree, like an ugly caw of some strange bird, a grating, sawing sound.

I look up, grasping my knife. I can just see Katniss way up above. She's changed positions overnight, and she's in motion - not climbing up or down, but shaking or something. Then I understand. She's sawing a branch.

I hold my breath and try to puzzle this out. She's so far up that any branch she drops on us will not be dangerous to us. Does she mean to use it as a weapon, somehow? That makes even less sense. Perhaps a distraction? All I know is, she knows what she's doing in the woods, so I need to pause and let her -.

The branch is weighed down with a massive bee hive. I have a split second to register the fact before it comes crashing down on us, hitting the fire and scattering sparks and wasps together.

I jump up first, my wakefulness a distinct advantage. The knife slides down to the ground but there is no chance to retrieve it. I know only one thing in the entire world – to run, as fast and as far as possible. By the time everyone's up and screaming, I have bolted away from the strange mass of fiery, smoky, swirling bees. Marvel yells, "Get to the lake, the lake!" But I can't see who is or is not behind me. I feel one sting, two, three, and I'm frantically moving.

Then, as the world around me starts collapsing in sparkly shards, I find myself slowing down, down, down. One, two, three people pass me – indistinct as shadows. There is a slow hum in my ear, a buzzing. No ordinary bees, I think. The muttation version. Tracker jackers, whose stings are poison - hallucinations, fear, death. There's a burning sensation on my chest, and I look down to see myself on fire. Real or not real? I frantically pat myself down and try to find my bearings.

I can see the tracker jackers following behind the others as they continue to run. It's so curious, like a shimmering trail of smoke. I look down at myself and see smoke trails there, as well. Otherwise, I seem to be intact, though I feel lighter than I should. I'm not holding my knife - that accounts for it. A disaster. I have a job to do with it, I remind myself. What is it? What?

The bow! Did I miss my chance to secure it for Katniss? Where is Glimmer? Is she with the boys? Is she behind me?

I turn around, and even the process of pivoting makes the earth beneath me rock unsteadily. I head back toward the woods - the woods that look like smudgy watercolors – flat, blurry. Surreal. I hear some strangled gasps coming from one side of me and I pursue the sound. Eventually, I come upon her, twitching on the ground, her face and hands swollen, her honey-colored hair around her like a golden net.

"Bet?"

Even as I say it, there is a cannon. Boom! It sounds different today, reverberating strangely. Bet keeps twitching and I go to her, but she is so deformed, the sight frightens me. Then she stops and Boom!

Someone else has died, too, I think dully. I pick up Bet's trident, which is light; the three prongs are sharp and quivery. This wasn't my strong suit, but if I'm in close enough range….

As I move away from her, the hovercraft appears and picks her up and pulls her out of the arena. I watch her go – almost curiously envious that she has escaped this nightmare place. Then I head into the trees, following the trampled grass back toward where we camped last night. I can hear footsteps behind me and I run from them, determined to make it there first. It makes no real sense, but the tree and Katniss are one and the same to me right now.

And, astonishingly enough, she's there. She's hunched over Glimmer's body and at last she has her bow. But there's something wrong with her, something dizzy about the way she's looking at me. Something limp and helpless about the way she is holding the weapon. If she could effectively arm herself, I'd be dead already, probably. I see a swollen purple sting on her neck and know she must be at least as confused as I am. But the footsteps are coming behind me. "What are you still doing here?" I hiss at her. I go up to her, prod at her with the shaft of the trident. "Are you mad? Get up! Get up!" The footsteps are upon us now. "Run! Run!"

I turn around to face Cato. The venom has made his face purple and puffy. I see his red eyes zoom out at me. He dropped his big sword, but he still had one in his belt and he lurches forward with it now. But it's not toward me he is running, it's the escaping girl. Desperation forces my limbs to move. I lurch forward to block him, the trident hitching up with the spastic movement of my hand. He looks so unreal – so unlike himself – that it helps me visualize, instead, the training dummies in the tribute center.

"No!" I thrust the trident forward with every ounce of strength I can muster, and I catch him in the side as he tries to swerve around me. He screams in rage and brings the sword down on me in one quick, sickening stroke. It goes deep, deep into my upper thigh and I fall to the ground.