Fall Away

Once Peeta was able to stand and walk on his own again, we let Katniss take the lead. She kept a handful of small acorns and pebbles at her side, tossing them along the forcefield every few feet to help us hug it as closely as possible. I hadn’t realized how quickly I had settled back into the vulnerable terror until now; knowing that there was an entire 180 degrees alongside us that we didn’t need to watch for other tributes almost made me feel like I could let my guard down.

Which was dangerous in itself.

Before long, however, Peeta started to slow down again. He tried to hide his panting and wincing, but watching him struggle sent pangs of guilt straight to my stomach.

“Maybe we should set up camp for the night,” I said, taking care not to look at Peeta in case he could read my expression.

“We can’t stop. We still haven’t found fresh water,” Katniss urged.

I scanned our surroundings before spotting a looming tree, taller than the others, a few feet ahead of us. “Then we should at least get to high ground and see what’s around us. It’s no good wandering around blindly.”

Katniss paused, and I couldn’t tell if she was thinking through my logic or figuring out if there was some way I could use this plan to betray her. Without thinking I cast a glance back at Peeta, who had slumped over against a nearby rock the second we had stopped walking; Katniss noticed my eyes flicker towards him and she took a moment to look him over as well. When her eyes met mine again, there was a softness to them — not quite trust, but the closest thing to it that could exist in the arena.

“Sure. I’ll go with you,” she finally agreed. Her voice was still hard and cold, but I noticed the way the corners of her lips softened and her jaw unclenched.

Finnick shifted rigidly, scrutinizing Katniss. “I’ll stay here with Peeta, then. Can’t just leave him alone when he’s so vulnerable,” he pointed out, though there was an insidious kind of threat to his voice. The message was clear: ‘Don’t hurt her, and I won’t hurt him.’

The softness vanished from Katniss’s face.

We climbed the tree in silence, not speaking until we reached the top branches and could finally see through the canopy of the leaves. I scanned the arena as carefully as possible; we were on the highest ground possible, looking down at a jungle of trees broken up only by the perfectly round saltwater bay in the middle. The cornucopia sat in the middle of the bay, surrounded by perfectly equidistant arms of rock that reached out towards the shoreline. I tried scanning the trees for any sort of break or jut that might indicate a stream, but the forest was unrelenting in its density, the treetops shrouded in a humid smoggy mist.

“Nothing,” I said finally, looking to Katniss in defeat.

She nodded, unsurprised, then glanced quizzically up at the clouds. She raised her bow and reached behind her to pluck an arrow from her quiver, and my fingers twitched towards the knives on my belt, but she simply shot the arrow clear up into the sky and watched as it shimmered in an odd, honeycomb pattern much like the panels that had appeared when Peeta had cut into the forcefield earlier.

“Great,” she muttered, starting to scale her way back down the tree with a bitter look on her face. I knew what it was because I felt it too; the bitter feeling of helplessness.

“There has to be something. Dehydration would take us too quickly and without enough bloodshed; there’s no way the Game Makers would want such an anticlimactic Quarter Quell,” I said, following her lead back down the tree.

“What do you suggest we look for, then? Since clearly you know the Game Makers so well,” she snapped.

I plucked an acorn off the branch nearest me and threw it at Katniss, feeling a rush of glib satisfaction when it bounced off her forehead.

Katniss froze and whipped her face towards me with a glare. She held my gaze darkly for a moment, and then she did the most unexpected thing I could have imagined.

She smiled.

“Sorry,” I said, biting back a grin of my own.

“Me too. You’re right to think about what the Game Makers would do,” she acknowledged.

“Trying to protect the ones you love would make anybody tense,” I said. The words felt vulnerable, almost dangerous, but I knew Katniss would understand.

She paused for a long time, as if debating whether or not to speak. When she finally broke the silence, she tried hard to sound casual. “Do you really think Finnick needs your protection?”

“What about Peeta? He got a score of 12,” I said defensively.

Katniss sighed. “He also just walked into a forcefield.”

She had a point. “Everyone needs some kind of protection in here, if they can find it,” I said lamely. It was a stupid thing to say, but I didn’t have any other answer to give her.

“Including Adri?” she said, and she looked in my eyes with such knowingness that I felt completely transparent under her gaze.

I didn’t even bother with a deflective response; I quickened my pace scaling down the tree, leaving her to try and catch up.

“Well? Did you see anything?” Finnick asked once we were back on the ground. He shifted closer to me so easily that I wondered if he even knew he was doing it at all; like we were two bodies pulled together by gravity.

“It’s a dome,” Katniss said, her eyes scouring over Peeta to make sure he was okay. “And we’re on the edge of the arena.”

“We didn’t see any signs of streams or fresh water up there,” I added softly. As if saying it quietly would make the disappointment hurt less

Peeta’s face fell.

Finnick cleared his throat, shaking off his own disappointment. “It’s going to get dark soon. We’ll be safe here with our backs protected; we should set up camp and take turns sleeping.” He paused, then added; “I can take first watch.”

As expected, Katniss scoffed. “Not a chance.”

The knuckles on Finnick’s hand grew white as he clenched his fist around his trident. He smiled wryly, but there was a wary exhaustion still clear in his eyes, in the tightness of his shoulders. “That thing I did back there for Peeta? That’s called ‘saving his life’. If I wanted to kill either of you, I would’ve done it by now.” He spun the trident easily in his hand before turning away wordlessly, guiding me with him by placing a gentle hand on the small of my back.

“Glad to see you two are such fast friends,” I said sarcastically.

“Don’t get jealous, now,” he teased, winking at me.

I rolled my eyes. “Idiot,” I muttered, joining him in clearing the rocks and pinecones off a small clearing in the soil for us to sleep on. “Why did you save him?” I asked quietly after a few moments.

He tried to keep his expression calm and unchanged, but I didn’t miss the way his shoulders tightened again at the question. “Gotta earn trust to have a good alliance,” he said dismissively.

The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me; the more he tried to brush off his strange actions as trust-building with Katniss, the more I questioned my own trust in him. I thought about saying just that, but quickly remembered where we were and all the cameras trained on us, so instead I simply said, “I guess so.”