All Of Me

Chapter 10

-CHAPTER 10-

I wake up to see Katniss shaking me, yelling "Get up!" I give her a smirk and sit up, but then I notice the worry in her eyes. "What is it?" She ignores me and continues waking everyone else up. Once we're all awake, she sits in front of us and starts explaining the arena. How it's shaped like a clock. How every hour, there is a new horror, in a new section. "The arena, it's a clock." She says. I look around the arena and see the spokes, splitting the arena into 12 sections. I see the blood rain pouring down in one of the sections. I remember the lightning and the 12 bongs last night at around midnight. Suddenly, it all makes sense. "It's a clock..." I whisper to myself. I turn to Wiress and give her a gentle pat on the back. "Wiress, you're a genius!" We decide to go to neutral ground where there won't be any unforeseen horrors: the cornucopia. Peeta tries to pick up Beetee, but Beetee objects and groans "Wire..." Peeta gestures at Wiress and says "She's right here, she's coming with us." Beetee groans again "Wire..." Johanna rolls her eyes and says impatiently "Oh, I know what he wants." She picks up a spindle of gold wire that I hadn't noticed earlier and hands it to Beetee. "This worthless thing. It's some kind of wire or something. That's how he got cut. Running up to the cornucopia to get this. I don't know what kind of weapon it's supposed to be. I guess you could pull off a piece and use it as a garrote or something. But really, can you imagine Beetee garroting somebody?" She scoffs at the thought. "He won his Games with wire. Setting up that electrical trap," says Peeta. "It's the best weapon he could have." Katniss speaks up. "Seems like you'd have figured that out, considering you nicknamed him Volts and all." I glance at Katniss and notice her eyes are now a stormy gray. She looks both curious and annoyed. I glance at Johanna and see the flames in her eyes again. Uh oh, I think. I know where this is going. Johanna's eyes narrow. "Yeah, that was really stupid of me, wasn't it? I guess I must have been distracted by keeping your little friends alive. While you were... what, again?" She smiles wickedly. I know that smile anywhere. Someone here's about to get a punch in the gut, figuratively, of course. "Getting Mags killed off?" And it's me who ends up getting the punch in the gut. I close my eyes as I start breathing at a faster pace. Mags... The other half of my family... Gone... I take deep breaths, trying to calm down. When I open my eyes again, I see Katniss' fingers tighten around her knife. Oh no... Johanna snarls "Go ahead. Try it. I don't care if you are knocked up. I'll rip your throat out." I step in between them. "Maybe we had all better be careful where we step." I shoot Katniss a look, knowing she can control her anger better than Johanna can. Peeta picks up Beetee and asks "Where to?" I look towards the cornucopia. "I'd like to go to the cornucopia and watch. Just to make sure we're right about the clock." Everybody agrees and we head down the nearest spoke towards the cornucopia. When we arrive, the four of us who are still well enough start picking through the remaining weapons. Beetee is resting on the ground, facing us, and Wiress is cleaning off Beetee's wire in the ocean water. She starts singing some old nursery rhyme about a mouse running up a clock or something. Johanna rolls her eyes. "Oh, not the song again. That went on for hours before she started tick-tocking." Wiress stands up and points at the jungle, where the fog has just started to seep out and says "Two." Peeta nods. "Like clockwork. You were very smart to figure that out, Wiress." Wiress smiles and goes back to cleaning the spool of wire. Beetee looks up at Peeta. "Oh, she's more than smart. She's intuitive." We all turn to look at him; he seems to be coming back to life. Beetee looks up at Katniss. "She can sense things before anyone else. Like a canary in one of your coal mines." A canary? I've never heard of that before. I turn to Katniss. "What's that?" "It's a bird that we take down into the mines to warn us if there's bad air." I guess we don't have canarys in District 4, as I've never heard of one. "What's it do, die?" says Johanna. "It stops singing first. That's when you should get out. But if the air's too bad, it dies, yes. And so do you." I can see the sadness in Katniss' eyes, a relative of hers must have died in the mines. I think we should stop asking her questions about it. I give Johanna a look that means "Stop." Luckily, she gets the hint and goes silent. We go back to picking through the weapons. I come upon some more tridents and smile. I've been using tridents ever since I was 5. My dad had gotten me a mini trident for my 5th birthday and he immediately took me out to the beach to start using it. I smile at the memory. But my dad is no longer here, he died when I was 16. I refused to do what President Snow told me to do. I refused to be a prostitute, I refused to sleep with many Capitol women. But Snow had warned me, and I hadn't taken it seriously. He staged a little "accident" before I came home from mentoring my tributes that year. My dad was at our old house, he visited there often, when it went up in flames. He was dead before anyone could get there to help. I still remember that day. Walking into our new home, yelling my dad's name with no response. Sprinting to our old house, only to find it burnt to the ground. I remember crawling through the ashes until I came upon a burnt torso, the limbs barely there. You could barely tell it was once a human. I never got to say goodbye... I continue picking through the weapons. I come across a light net and smirk. I glance at Katniss, who is faced the other way, looking for more arrows. I throw the net towards her, aiming for her head. By the time the net drapes over her head, I am right behind her, my lips almost touching her ear. She yelps and I chuckle. "I caught you..." I whisper. "But really, you have caught me..." I take the net and go back to looking for more weapons, but I watch her out of the corner of my eye. She looks like she's thinking about what I just said. Did she understand what I meant by "But really, you have caught me"? What I meant was that she has caught my heart. I hope she understood, because really, she has caught me. Because really, she has caught my heart.

-END OF CHAPTER 10-