The Hunger Games ~ Peeta's POV

Chapter 15

I burst through the last of the bushes, panting breathlessly as I see Katniss. She's hunched over a bow and arrows, Glimmer's, I think, and is on her knees. She looks dead in the face, hollow in the cheekbones, and her eyes are closed. I know she's tired, but if she wants to live, then she's going to have to move. Now.

"What are you still doing here?" I bark, whisper yelling at her. "Are you mad?" I grab my spear off of the ground, and begin to poke her with the shaft of it urgently. She wobbles up onto her feet uneasily, and I know she's been stung too, by the looks of it. She's still too slow. "Get up! Get up!" I shove her harder than I intended to into the forest. "Run!" I screech ecstatically. "Run!" Before Cato gets to you, before you're slaughtered...

She just stumbles her way into the hidden woods as Cato tramples into the clearing, too. He looks furious, perhaps he overheard me yelling? By the hardened glare on his face, it seems that he did. But I know that he'll deal with me first before going to get Katniss, since I'm the closer, the easier target. I probably got more stings than he did, so killing me should be simple, not a mind straining task. I wait for the fear of him to come wash over me as it always does, but suddenly, I'm not so petrified of the thought of death. Actually, it seems quite inviting, if you think about it from a criminally insane point of view...

He snags his spear from his stash of weapons, and charges for me. The tip of the spear glistens in the light of the morning sun just as it breaks the skin on my left thy. It hits me with such force that I fall over on the ground, clutching it desperately, trying to stop the waterfall of blood from gushing out. I was expecting something generic, like through the heart, but he must have decided to kill me slowly. Spasms of pain shoot up my leg, much like the Tracker Jacker stings, but a lot more painful. I can't hardly move myself as I'm paralyzed in the after shock of the blow. I muster up the courage to turn my head up to Cato. Anything would be better than this too real feeling, the burning fire on my insides. He's smirking at me, and I plead with my eyes for him to just go ahead and finish me off.

"Nah, you look to comfortable there to disturb," he grins evilly. "I guess that's what you get for being a two-timer. Have fun bleeding yourself dry, Lover Boy."

And then he walks away, leaving me laying there with a gaping hole in my leg and nowhere to go. I grab my pack and my weapons and drag myself a couple of feet over to underneath a bush. I don't think I could go much farther without crying out in pain desperately. And I refuse to show weakness.

I am holding on to my pack like it's a Teddy bear, and I'm five years old again after I just scraped my knee. I dont know what to do about my leg, so I just rip a bit off of my pants and tie it securely around my leg. Suddenly, without warning, I lose my lunch next to myself. Ughhh... I had completely forgotten about the Tracker Jacker stings until just now. The adrenaline of saving a life wears down, and I become less and less aware of my surroundings as the venom takes effect. The trees and the sky turn into distorted images of people I once knew in another world, another life. I begin to sink down into the earth like as if I'm in quicksand, and my eyelids slide down tiredly. But rest I don't.

I fall into a disturbing sleep, if you could even call it that. I relive that worst moments of my entire life, enhanced tediously with horror. My dreams are so unspeakably horrible that I don't even know what to think when I wake up, but then I fall back asleep again and have more nightmares, and the process repeats.

I have one dream, one of the milder ones, about President Snow, with Katniss as his object of torture. He tries to play her neck like a fiddle, but using his knife as a bow. I watch her throat open up and her gasps for air as she chokes on her own blood, and her eyeballs roll into the back of her head. I'm just standing there, screaming, and crying hysterically as he shoves her away, and her limp body slumps to the ground lifelessly. I'm chained up, so I can't do anything about this, and my hands and wrists are bloody raw as I struggle. President Snow walks over to me, knife in hand, and I beg him to kill me, too. But he just smiles at me, bittersweet.