One Fire: A One Direction Fan Fiction

20

20

   “Tartan came at me, and he just tried to kill me,” Chiffon said through a series of sobs and flinches as I touched a wetted strip of bandage to her wound.

   She was telling us of how her injury had come to be. Tartan Cooley wasn’t one any of us had bothered to make an alliance with, and, apparently we were right to do so if his first action had been to go straight for his district counterpart.

   Somehow, Leah and I had managed to help Chiffon climb the tree to the branch we’d escaped to. In her survival pack – the only thing she’d been able to grab at the Cornucopia before she’d been attacked – there was a full canteen, which I’d used to wet the bandages. I didn’t care if it was a perfect source of drinking water. Leah and I had taken sips, and I’d dove into work. Chiffon had been great at figuring out traps in training – I’d seen her manage to braid millions of inch-long grass blades into a large net – and was definitely a useful ally to have, especially in this arena, which contained many different materials which could be useful for trapping.

   “You’ll be okay if you stick with us,” Leah tells her in a calm voice. She’d been trying her best to dry Chiffon’s tears since we’d found her, obviously taking my advice to save the tears for after.

   “I know,” she says quietly with a tiny nod, the most she could stand through her pain. But her cut wasn’t too bad. The one I’d gotten last year from Perrie Edwards had been deeper, and it had scabbed over on its own overnight.

   When we’d helped her, she helped us in return. She told us to get in our sleeping bag, and tied the wire around us in a tight, confusing knot, which she said could only be undone by delicate fingers, and would keep us up on the branch if we rolled over the edge. She did the same to herself in the sleeping bag she’d gotten.

   Together, the three of us looked up into the sky as the Capitol anthem began to sound, and the seal appeared projected on the sky on a part without the chinks Mousy had shown me during training. Only two pictures were shown as the canon had told us: Teak Duke – the thirteen-year-old boy from Seven – and Jussila Rivas – the seventeen-year-old from Ten.

   “Cedar’s probably crying already,” Chiffon murmured.

   I knew Cedar was. In training when she and Teak had given us tips on throwing axes, they’d seemed so close, like a brother and sister. Both of them had been in our alliance, but now, we only had one of them.

   I played over everyone I’d teamed with this time around in my head. Last year, I had been limited to Louis, who had led me to Zayn, who had led us to Liam and Danielle, who had made an alliance with Niall. This year, I had over half the tributes on my side thanks to the blazing boys. My alliance consisted of the following: Topaz, Zayn, Gabbi, Niall, Mousy, Liam, Jella, Louis, Dolly – the girl from Five – Cedar, Chiffon, the twins, Finn – from Ten – and, of course, Leah and myself. There had been seventeen of us, and now we were down one.

   Leah had already fallen asleep, head on my chest and arms clinging to me, and Chiffon was well on her way, so I was left awake. I stared up through the dense leaves to the stars, seeing the rippled chinks in certain spots which morphed the constellations.

   Just as I was beginning to drift off into slumber, a loud crack filled my ears. I shot up, just in time to see a bolt of lightning touch the ground near the north part of the arena. I breathed a sigh of relief, and started to fall back into my previous position, when I was interrupted again, by another lightning bolt cracking down in the southern part of the arena. There hadn’t even been any thunder between them, and no rain drops were pattering down on us. That was the last I saw of the storm, however, before I fell asleep.