The 70th Hunger Games: A Little Love

Chapter Eleven

*DISCLAIMER* this episode mentions suicidal thoughts. if this may trigger you, please be cautious reading. i will include a trigger warning at the beginning and end of that section.

Dear Diary,

Teardrops.

I feel teardrops on my face, but I'm not crying. Where did they come from? I wipe my face with my hand, just to find my hand wet as well. Reaching out to the outside of the tree, I find my hand getting soaked with raindrops.

Raindrops.

Not teardrops. Stop thinking about everything so negatively, Annie.

I untie myself from the branch I was on, making sure to carefully climb down the wet branches of the tree. When I get to the branch Percy is resting on, I shake him softly. "Come on Percy. We have to get going," I whisper, looking down to see that there were no velociraptors around us currently. Who knows when they would be coming back, though.

Percy wakes up, smiling sheepishly at me and rubbing his eyes. "g'd mornin Annie..." he mutters as his eyes adjust to the sunlight. I laugh softly, thinking about how he seems just like himself as a young boy, when Watter and I first became friends and we used to babysit Percy together. How I wish he was still that young boy, naive and not dying in the games.

We both make it down the tree without slipping on the wet wood, but as I let go of one of the branches, I feel a seething pain in my shoulder. Looking over to the open wound, I sharply inhale as I notice that overnight the wound has gotten very dark in some spots, while others seem to be oozing some sort of yellow puss. I swallow nervously, knowing that if I didn't get some sort of medicine soon, it would probably get infected, and I'd leave Percy on his own, to fend for himself. I couldn't do that. I had to keep going. If not for me, then for him, and all the ways he reminded me of little Alex back home.

As we're walking back, we hear a small hissing sound coming from the bushes to our right. Not wanting to stay and find out what that hissing might be, Percy and I pick up our speed, creating a large distance between us and the hissing bush. As we continue on moving, I find myself feeling slightly more and more tired. After about an hour of our fast walking/jogging pace, we finally enter the area of the arena that seems more like a lush forest and less like a mountainous, dinosaur filled horror.

"Percy," I mumble, and when he turns to me, I swear he looks like Alex, with his eyebrows knit together so innocently. "Let's take a break..." I add, reaching for his backpack and signaling that I wanted, more needed, my canteen of water and some crackers. Perhaps running solely on crackers is not a good idea, but hey, what else am I supposed to do? I've lived so much of my life meat free, turning to meat now would not only hurt me emotionally, but probably physically too.

"Here, Annie, you stay here," Percy helps me sit up against my tree, feeling my head and commenting that I already feel hot. That's great. That's totally what we need right now, is for this cut to get infected and for me to get sick. I don't want Percy to be on his own. I can't do that to him.

"I'm going to go find a shadermellon for you to eat, so you can rest," he promises, venturing off further into the forrest domain that I preferred much more than the historic monster-ridden one.

"Be safe!" I call out, drinking some water and nervously trying to pour some over my cut. I instantly scream out, feeling vile rise in my throat from the pain that the gash was emitting throughout my body. Looking into my water canteen, I see a reflection that doesn't quite look like me. My nose is a mixture of red and blue, like an evening sunset, but ugly. My eye is  swollen a deep shade of purple that almost looks black in the reflection of the water. I take another sip, cursing the velociraptor that jumped up and hit my face. How on earth am I supposed to get sponsors if I'm not pretty? That seems to be all I have going for me now.