Catching Fire (Katniss loves Peeta)

Chapter 16

"Katniss are you okay?" Peeta asks next to me in the elevator.

"Yeah, I'm super," I say sarcastically.

"Well, you zoned out for a while, just checking."

"I'm fine. Just feeling super excited about training!" Peeta snorts. He knows I'm not excited. I walk over and hug him.

"I love you." Peeta smiles warmly at me and wraps his arm around my waist. "I love you too."

He leans in and so does I our lips meet and sparks collide. I vaguely hear a ding in the background, indicating we are in the training center. I don't care that soon we're both about to go into the Games. I just care about now. Here in this moment. And that's how I like to live. How I should live. Someone clears their throat and I turn around. I'm immediately reminded of my mother. She'd always do that when she caught us. I lean away from Peeta and notice that everyone in the vicinity is gawking at us. We nervously walk off the elevator.

Before we got on the elevator, Haymitch said we should try to make friends. Peeta told me that I didn't have to listen to him.

He is my mentor, though, so I'll listen to the friend's thing but not my choice.

"What?" I shout. They all turn around. Except for Johanna Mason and Finnick Odair, they stand there smirking. Why can't everyone mind their own business?

Peeta and I decided to split up thus covering more territory. When he goes off to chunk spears with Brutus and Chaff, I head over to the knot-tying station. Almost no one ever visits it. The trainer is polite, and he remembers me from last year.

I ask him to review a few from last year and a few I'll never use. I'm content with spending the morning without any other victors, but soon enough, someone puts his arm around me from behind, his fingers easily finishing the complicated knot I've been struggling with.

Of course, it's Finnick, who seems to have spent his childhood doing nothing but wielding tridents and manipulating ropes into fancy nooses for nets, I guess. I watch for a minute while he picks up a length of rope, makes a noose, and pretends to hang himself for my amusement.

I roll my eyes and walk over to a vacant station where tributes can learn to build fires. I can already make excellent fires, but I'm still pretty dependent on matches for starting them. The trainer has me work with flint, steel, and some charred cloth. It's much harder than it looks and takes me about an hour to get a fire going. I look up with a triumphant smile to find that I have company.

District 3 is beside me trying to start a fire with matches. I think about leaving, but if Haymitch wants me to make friends these two might be bearable choices. The woman, Wiress is about my mother's age and speaks quietly but intelligently. Right away I notice she has a habit of dropping off her words mid-sentence. Beetee, the man, is older and somewhat fidgety. I glance around the Training Center. Peeta is at a center of a ribald circle of knife throwers. I decide to stay here.

They show me that they have a force field up around the Gamemakers and how to detect it. Which proves they are smart, so I want them for allies. By lunch I'm exhausted. Peeta is pushing tables together with the majority so that most of us will have to eat together. It doesn't really surprise me Peeta was always the popular one in school. It's amazing he even noticed me other than to think I'm odd. I'm filling my lunch tray when Peeta walks up next to me.

"How's it going?"

"Good. I like District Three Victors," I say. "Wiress and Beetee."

"Really?" He asks. "They're something of a joke to the others."

"Why does that not surprise me?" In school, he was always surrounded by friends.

"Johanna nicknamed them Nuts and Volts," he says. "I think she's Nuts and he's Volts."

"And I'm so stupid for thinking they might be useful because of something Johanna Mason said while she was oiling up her breasts for wresting," I counter.

"I think the nicknames been around for years. And I didn't mean that as an insult. I'm just sharing information."

"Wiress and Beetee are smart they saw the force field between the Gamemakers and us. And if we have to have allies, I want them." Peeta shakes his head.

"What?" I ask quietly.

"You can have the last say in our allies, I promise. But I'm leaning toward more of the careers."

"I get the final say."

"Right. Come and eat with me." Before I can even respond, he puts his hand around my waist and guides me to two empty seats at their table.

It's like that almost every day. Peeta drags me over there, and I sit down only commenting never even starting a conversation. One day I do shoot a bow though. And when I finish everyone is watching me. I don't particularly like the attention.

Haymitch informs me that everyone wants me as an ally after they saw me shoot. He wasn't pleased when I told him I want Wiress, Beetee, and Mags. Dinner grows quieter every night. Peeta and I always have something to talk about in private though.

Haymitch and Effie are beyond sick of our pillow fights, especially the time we had one in the living room. My feet hurt a lot during training, and I'm not even sure why.

"What are you doing for training?" I ask Peeta.

"Camouflage? I have no clue. What are you doing?" He responds.

"I was going to do arrows, but I did those last year. I don't know what I'm going to do now." I say. I run a mental checklist over everything I did in training that can be used for my score. The noose Finnick taught me to tie might suffice.

"How are we going to kill these people, Peeta?" I've gotten to know them, and I don't want to kill them. Some of them are so gone that my first instinct would be to protect them. But that must be forgotten if Peeta is to win.

"I don't know, Katniss." He leans his forehead down on our entwined hands on the table.

"I don't want them as allies. Why did Haymitch want us to get to know them?" I say.

"It'll make it so much harder than last time. Except for Rue maybe. I could never have killed her, anyway. She was just too much like Prim."

Peeta looks up at me, his brow creased in thought. "Her death was the most despicable, wasn't it?"

"None of them were very pretty," I say, thinking of Glimmer's and Cato's ends.

They call Peeta, so I wait by myself. Fifteen minutes pass. Then half an hour. It's close to forty minutes before I'm called.

When I go in, I smell the sharp odor of cleaner and notice that one of the mats had been dragged to the center of the room. The mood is very different from last year's when the Gamemakers were half drunk and distractedly picking at tidbits from the banquet table. They whisper among themselves looking annoyed. What did Peeta do?

I feel a pang of worry. That isn't good. How did Peeta upset them? Because I'd love to do just that and more. Do you have any idea how much I hate you? I think. You who have given your talents to the Games?

Plutarch Heavensbee seems to be ignoring me, as he has for the entire training period. Suddenly I know just what I'm going to do. Something that will blow anything that Peeta did right out of the water. I make a noose and use the chinning bars to hang a target dummy. I hurry over to the camouflage station and find some paint that looks like bloodred berry juice. I carefully finger paint the words on its body, concealing them from the Gamemakers view. Then I step away as they read the name on the dummy.

Seneca Crane.

I'm so sorry for being late! In my defense, I've been working on correcting flaws in past chapters! And I have been stressing about my new school. I updated! Thank you for reading! As always correct me on my errors in the chapter!

-KD Howell