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No One Knows Who I Am	By : Marblez Category: G through L > The Hunger Games Trilogy Views: 4841 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I don't own the Hunger Games and I will make no profit from writing this story.

Chapter List
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The Arena, Day One

            His heart was beating so quickly he feared it would burst out from his chest.
            The ground was uneven underfoot, covered with a dangerous network of tree roots which had caused him to stumble more than once.
            Una said nothing.
            She clutched at his hand so tightly he was beginning to lose the feeling in his fingers as she dragged him further and further away from the Cornucopia.
            The sounds of fighting had long since faded.
            The fighting was over.
            For now.
            Eventually Una came to a rather abrupt halt, spinning on the spot and throwing herself into his arms with a loud sob.
            He said nothing.
            The first canon sounded as they held each other close.
            By the time the tenth had sounded they were both weeping openly, choking back their sobs as they collapsed to their knees never once letting go of each other.
            It was sometime later when they finally separated.
            “Adya?” Una asked softly once they were seated at the base of one of the many trees imagined were surrounding them, their sides pressed together from shoulder to knee. “Were you…were you really going to just sit there?”
            Adya sighed.
            “Yes.”
            “Why?”
            “I’m not getting out of here,” Adya answered simply, smiling sadly in her direction. “So I thought if I just sat there…and then just waited for…well…I thought if I did that I could at least ensure that my death would be remembered…”
            “Oh…”
            Reaching out blindly he found her hand, linking their fingers together.
            “Una?”
            “Yes?”
            “Why did you save me?”
            “I…I didn’t want to die alone.”
            Adya smiled sadly.
            “Ok…” he murmured, rubbing his thumb against his bottom lip as he allowed his mind to begin formulating some sort of plan for the immediate future. “Ok…then I guess we’re in this together then…so, first things first…where are we? I can smell trees and I can hear some birds a little way off.”
            “Yeah, we’re in some sort of wood,” Una confirmed. “The Cornucopia was in a clearing but we can’t go back there because…”
            Adya nodded in understanding.
            The Careers.
            Cato.
            “Ok…”
            His mind was a whirlwind of confusion.
            Not once since his name had been read out at the Reaping Ceremony had he expected to live this long, to survive past the bloodbath that was the Cornucopia.
            He had no idea what to do.
            “Right…”
            He sighed, desperately trying to bring order to his thoughts.
            “Did you manage to grab any supplies?”
            “Just one of the little bags,” Una answered, reaching across him to pick something up off of the group where she must have dropped it. “It was on the edge of the clearing. I grabbed it on my way to you.”
            “Ok…”
            He tried to remember everything Woof and Cecelia had taught them.
            “Have we got cover? I mean…can we be seen or are we hidden?”
            “We’re surrounded by bushes,” Una answered. “And a tree. I mean we’re leaning against it so you knew about the tree. We should be ok for a little while.”
            Adya nodded.
            “So what’s in the bag?”
            He listened to the sounds of her opening the bag, waiting silently as she tipped out the contents onto the ground beside her.
            “So?” he asked, trying not to sound too impatient with her after a rather lengthy pause. “What have we got?”
            “Um…a box of matches and a knife. A really small knife.”
            Adya frowned.
            “…is that it?” he found himself asking softly.
            “It’s a small bag.”
            Fantastic.
            Adya sighed.
            “I’ll admit I was hoping for a blanket or something,” he murmured. “I can already feel the temperature dropping which means tonight is going to be cold.”
            “Well, can’t we just make a fire?” Una asked. “We’ve got matches…”
            Adya rolled his sightless eyes in the direction of her voice.
            “Well of course we could do that if you want to attract every Career in the Arena,” he responded, shaking his head. “Smoke. The light of the flames. The smell of burning wood. They’d be on us minutes.”
            “…I hadn’t thought of that,” Una mumbled, her voice trembling even more than before as she passed both the matches and the knife over to Adya who quickly put both items in one of his jackets many pockets. “So…what are we going to do?”
            Adya fell silent for a moment, thinking back to the things they had been taught at the survival station during their training.
            “There are three main ways to keep warm inside the Arena – the first is to build a fire. This is very risky and should only be done if you are very confident about the security of your location.
“The second is to use one of the blankets or sleeping bags that are offered in the Cornucopia. Of course this requires surviving the Cornucopia itself.
“The Third is the simplest method so long as you have someone you can trust. Share body heat. This works best if you maximise the amount of skin contact between you and the person you are sharing body heat with.”
            As he’d already said a fire was definitely out and they didn’t have a blanket or a sleeping bag so that left…
            “We snuggle.”
            “…I beg your pardon?”
            Perhaps he shouldn’t have blurted it out quite like that.
            “We can share each other’s body heat,” he explained as simply as he could. “We can snuggle or cuddle, if you prefer, although they mean exactly the same thing. That way we’ll keep each other warm.”
            “Oh…ok…snuggling it is…”
            He could feel her beginning to smile beside him.
            He couldn’t blame.
            Given the danger of their current situation deciding that their best option for survival was to snuggle seemed a bit…surreal.
            “Now we need to make sure we can’t be seen,” Adya continued, reaching out with his free hand to find out just where the bushes Una spoke of were to give himself an idea of their surroundings.
His fingers met only air.
“You said we were surrounded by bushes?”
            “Yes, but you won’t be able to touch them,” Una answered quickly, holding tightly to his other hand. “They’re too far away.”
            “How far?”
            “Another hand or so?” Una didn’t sound very sure but he guessed that was simply because she wasn’t too sure how to measure distances.
            “How thick are they?” Adya asked.
            “Um…pretty thick?”
            Once again Una didn’t sound all that sure.
“Can you see through them?” Adya clarified his earlier question.
“Oh…um…only just.”
Adya let out a relived breath.
            “Good,” he murmured, patting the ground and smiling to himself as he found the ground covered with fallen leaves. “We can over ourselves with leaves. Guess it’s a good thing we’re wearing green after all.”
            Una agreed softly, moving away from him to gather up some leaves from the area surrounding their hiding place, returning to his side as quickly as she could.
            “The leaves are mostly brown, not green,” she murmured apologetically, placing the bundle of leaves on the floor between them. “Is that ok?”
            “It’s fine…”
            With any luck in the fading light they’d look like the ground should anything think to look through the bushes he hoped were surrounding them as much as his friend claimed they were.
            “Do you want me to keep watch for a bit?” Una offered as they set about finding a comfortable position to snuggle in before covering themselves with the leaves. “I mean, you won’t be…I…sorry…”
            “You need to get some sleep,” he interrupted her murmured apologies. “I can listen out for anything unusual and wake you if I hear someone coming. You’ve seen how good my hearing is.”
            “But you need sleep as well…” Una protested from where her head was now using his chest as a pillow, her body almost wrapped around his side.
            “I’ll wake you when I get tired,” he promised, knowing that of the two of them he would last the longest without sleep having had years of practise living alone on the streets of District 8.
            It was every man, or boy, for themselves on the streets.
            “You’re sure?”
            “Positive.”
            It seemed to take an age for his friends breathing to even out, signalling that she had dropped into the realm of dreams, leaving him alone to listen to the various sounds coming from the world surrounding him.
            Leaves continued to rustle in the breeze.
            As night fell, the air around him getting colder, the birds began to fall silent.
            Somewhere nearby a cricket began to sing, something he’d only heard once before and then it had been in a video shown to his class at school, not in real life.
            It was almost peaceful.
            So peaceful that he could almost forget why he was there.
            Almost.
            Hours passed in this peaceful manner, his mind conjuring up images long forgotten to match the sounds falling on his sensitive ears.
            And then he heard something moving above him, high in the trees.
            His breath seized in his chest.
            As suddenly as it began the noise stopped.
            He didn’t move.
            He waited.
            Nothing.
            He let out a deep breath.
            Relaxing back against the ground he smiled as he felt Una wriggling in her sleep, muttering under her breath as she pulled his arms tighter around her body, rubbing her face against the fabric of his jacket.
            It must have been an animal or something.
            Nothing to worry about.
            Cuddled up to Una as he was, the warmth of her body seeping into his own he felt sleep calling to him, a yawn breaking its way past his futile defences.
            His eyelids felt heavy.
            “Una?”
            No response.
            “Una?”
            “…what?” she finally mumbled, more asleep than awake. “Adya?”
            “Can you take over the watch for a bit? I need–”
            He was cut off by another yawn, this once even larger than the first.
            “O-Ok…” Una agreed, yawning herself as she brought a hand up to rub at her eyes. “What should I do if I see something?”
            “Run.”
            His answer were short and immediate.
            “What about you?”
            He could hear the fact that she was frowning in the tone of her voice.
            “I’d only slow you down.”
            Una huffed softly, shaking her head but sleep was dragging him down, plunging him into a familiar mess of remembered shapes and sounds and sights, colours more prominent than anything else as they always were in his dreams.
            His mind and body began to relax…
            “Adya!”
            Una’s scream snapped him back into the real world, his heart pounding as he found himself alone, his friend’s warmth gone from his body.
            “Una?” he asked, patting the ground where she had lain as he sat up. “Una?”
            That was when he heard it.
            Whimpering.
            Una.
            But there was something else.
            Breathing.
            “It’s the cripple.”
            He gasped, pushing himself up into a seated position.
            The Careers.
            They’d found them.
            “I’m sorry, Adya…”
            Una’s voice was little more than a sob.
            “I fell asleep…I’m sorry, Adya…I’m so sorry…”
            “Shut her up.”
            Glimmer.
            “I’m sor–”
            Una broke off with a frightened scream, her voice high and sharp, which was then cut off by a sickening gurgle.
            Something thudded to the ground.
            “Who knew you had it in you, lover boy,” Clove chuckled coldly, her voice little more than a sneer as she taunted someone in their group.
            “…Una?” Adya asked fearfully.
            His throat felt tight.
            A canon sounded.
            “Sorry, sweetheart,” Glimmer laughed down at him, even going so far as to pat him on the top of his head. “Your girlfriends a bit dead.”
            Adya felt something surging through his veins that he hadn’t felt since the fire which had caused the death of his parents and his own disfigurement had been discovered to be the work of arson.
            Anger.
            Rage.
            Hatred.
            He was aware of nothing other than her continued laughter.
            Cruel and grating.
            His hands moved of their own accord, burying them deep inside his jackets pockets so that his right hand could close around the handle of the knife.
            “You bitch…”
            Glimmer stopped laughing.
            “What did you call me?”
            Her voice was cold as she moved to stand directly in front of him.
            He smirked up at her.
            “I called you a bitch.”
            He moved quickly, throwing his body forwards so that his shoulder struck her leg, knocking her to the ground underneath him, giving him the perfect opportunity to draw the knife from his pocket and plunge it as deep as it would go into her side.
            Glimmer screamed.
            Pulling the knife out sharply he stabbed her again and again, her warm blood coating his hand, and it was only after the fourth stab wound had been delivered that he was pulled off of her body.
            An arm pressed across his throat, pinning his body to the tree.
            Glimmer whimpered.
            “That was for Una,” he spat in her direction, fighting against the hands holding him as the knife was forced out of his hand. “Bitch.”
            He prepared himself for the inevitable blow that would end his life.
            Perhaps Una would still be waiting for him…
            “Help me!” Glimmer demanded sharply, her voice trembling. “Cato!”
            “That’s a lot of blood…” a girl’s voice murmured, surprisingly unfamiliar.
            He didn’t think the Careers worked with anyone outside their circle.
            Adya smirked.
            “What are you waiting for?” he asked, directing his question to the person pinning him to the tree, spreading his arms wide. “Or would prefer for me to try and run? Because I can tell you right now I won’t give you the satisfaction.”
            “Cato…”
            “Shut up!”
            Adya felt his stomach clench at the sound of Cato’s voice so close to him.
            It was Cato who was pinning him to the tree.
            The boy who had kissed him.
            “I don’t feel…I think…”
            Glimmer’s voice was weak, making her sound young and vulnerable.
            Adya frowned.
            Could he have hit something vital?
            “Kill him, Cato!” Clove ordered sharply.
            “We need to get Glimmer back to camp before she loses too much blood…” the unfamiliar girl whimpered nervously. “We have medical supplies at the camp.”
            Glimmer let out a frightened sob.
            The pressure across his throat disappeared suddenly only to be replaced by the sharp point of a blade, pressed so tightly against his skin that it drew blood.
            “Cato!”
            The Careers breath hitched.
            “Please…” Adya found himself murmuring, closing his eyes in preparation of the end. “Cato…make it quick…”
            For a moment nothing happened.
            And then the blade was gone, leaving him to gasp loudly.
            “He comes with us.”
            Cato’s voice was soft but firm, a tone that Adya recognised as being one that couldn’t and more importantly shouldn’t be argued with.
            And yet Clove did.
            “Cato!”
            “I said he comes with us!”
            Adya couldn’t help but sigh, his body sagging with unexpected relief.
            What was it with people refusing to let him die?

A/N – Well I think it’s safe to say that my writers block has been well and truly banished. Two chapters written in as many days (but not posted quite as sharply unfortunately.) Comments/Suggestions always welcome. X
- 12
- 13
- 14
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No One Knows Who I Am