Always

Spinning

A.N. Dedicated to joshhutchersonlover2 thanks for the AWSOME shoutout! ❤️

Peeta takes Beete and cleans his wounds, while I help Wiress off the ground.

"Tick tock, tick tock." She mumbles under her breath as I walk her towards the ocean water.

"Tick tock," I repeat to her.

She's caked in a thick layer of blood and the smell is beginning to turn my stomach inside out. I set her down in the shallows of the water, hoping it will wash off some of the red. The change doesn't affect Wiress, she just keeps murmuring, "tick, tock" every few minutes, oblivious to her surroundings.

She doesn't resist when I take off her jumpsuit or her underclothes and begin to wash the blood from her skin. But her eyes do begin to reflect more and more fear, her murmurings of "tick, tock" becoming filled with urgency. I know that she's trying to tell me something, but without Beetee to translate, I'm at a loss. So I simply reply, "Yes. Tick, tock. Tick, tock."

This seems to calm Wiress and she goes back to her soft murmurings. I'm eventually able to wash the vast majority of the blood out of her jumpsuit and underclothes, and I gently ease her back into them. I buckle her belt around her waist, thinking that it provides at least some protection. I lead her back to camp, and sit her beside Peeta, who offers her some water that she gulps greedily. Satisfied that Wiress is taken care of, I return to the water and begin to clean Beetee's jumpsuit. I've just about finished eradicating every drop of blood from his jumpsuit when Johanna and Finnick reappear.

Johanna is shiny and clean and immediately plops down onto the sand and begins to drink water and feast on the tasty shellfish. I try and coax Wiress to eat with mild success while Finnick tells of our battles with the fog and the monkeys in an oddly detached voice, leaving out the most important detail.

Everyone offers to take watch to allow the others to rest, but in the end it's Johanna and I. Me, because I'm so well rested. Johanna simply doesn't want to sleep, despite having barely gotten an hour's worth since the Games started. I have no idea how she's still going. We sit side by side in silence for the longest time before Johanna speaks. "So how did you lose Mags?"

I turn to look at her, her face a stone cold with no warmth inside.

"We lost her in the fog. I wasn't strong enough to carry her and Finnick was already carrying Peeta. She walked straight into it, not even looking back.

"She was family to Finnick." Her voice isn't so cold when she speaks and I begin to see the Joanna from the roof break through.

We sit in silence and let the water run over our feet. "So what were you doing with Nuts and Volts?" I ask her.

"Haymitch said that in order to be allies, I had to get them for you."

"Right." I tell her even though I have no ideas what she's talking about.

"What else happened in there?" She asks me and the tears begin to form in my ears. Dang hormones.

"I had to leave Peeta behind. When the fog began to attack our nerves, he fell and wasn't able to get back up. On instinct I stopped and tried to help him, but I was too weak." I watch as the waves crash down once again. "He told me to run, to leave. And I did."

"Let me guess, he told you to run so that you could live?" She asks with sarcasm.

I roll my eyes at her. "And for the baby."

"Such a golden boy, willing to die for his child and wife." She mentions and I smile the slightest.

"Why would you risk having a baby? Everyone knows that the child of a victor goes into the games. But the child of two victors, the star crossed lovers, that child would be thrown in at the first reaping."