futile || cato's story ✔️

treeing katniss

A parachute floats down with more bread as soon as we're all back at the cornucopia. There is a glaring lack of anything for Marina, who can hardly stand despite Clove's stitches and makeshift compress and is soon forcedly drifting off thanks to the pain pills we found. Funny, if we were anyone else in the arena taking those pills could be a death sentence just as much as an aid, knocking you out to be finished off.

We divide the bread as Peeta passionately rants about the lack of medicine what with our certain overwhelming sponsorships.

But I know that the gamemakers sometimes do this, deliberately skyrocketing the price of medicine following a non life threatening incident such as ours so that sponsors are less inclined to send aid. We've discussed it in school, as it usually affects our core group, and seen it on Games in the past. It usually ends with the injured player dying soonest in a later battle or being killed by another member of the group. The intentional weakening of a link, an element of suspense sure to delight the viewers across Panem.

No one seems particularly eager to kill Marina, so I'm relying on her falling back in an upcoming battle, one that the gamemakers are certainly engineering as we all settle into sleep following the anthem. There's no one at all dead today and there was only our one-- the girl from Eight-- the day before. The snakebite and probably other minor incidents with other tributes are tiding them over, but the audience will be craving a good show tomorrow. And so am I, electric from empty searches and emptier hours sitting here as Marina recovers and the lot of us overindulge in rest.

The anthem and daylight long distant, I polish off a hearty dinner in dim moonlight.

Clove eventually sits beside me, a peach in hand. We rest framed in the mouth of the cornucopia.

"Kentwell," I greet with absent curiosity.

"Hadley."

Clove bites into the peach and stares several yards away at the flickering fire illuminating Marvel and Marina in and out of sleep as Glimmer and Peeta animatedly tells stories of their homes in One and Twelve, their lives condensed into these splintered bites for us and the audience. Clove watches for several minutes, a smile skirting across her silent face like a shadow at each joke or particularly reminiscent comment.

Clove watches them, and I watch Clove.

She must know, as she soon turns her attention back to me while taking a bite of the dripping fruit posed in her left hand. I recall that Clove naturally throws with her right hand, but does almost everything else left-handed; a topic of discussion in schoolyard discourse.

Clove asks, "Why are you always distant from the group? Even back in school... More often than not alone and observing."

"Straight back to psychoanalyzing me, then?" She doesn't answer. "It's as you said. Observing."

"Huh."

"Huh, what?"

Friendly sarcasm dripping like the juice from her fingers, she comments "Funny that you should take that position considering what a bitch you were about my observing last night."

"Hey, I observe politely from afar, simply taking notes for personal use, enjoying the company of my own mind. What you do is completely different. Maniacal even."

"Oh, maniacal? Really?" She swallows a bite and sucks at the strands stuck in her teeth.

"Maniacal, yes. Imagine I walk up to you and tell you exactly how you think and feel."

"Meaning I was right in my observations."

"Meaning you're missing the point."

"Oh, I know."