Heartbreak
Harry
“The Careers are here.”
Fuck.
Harry is wide awake faster than he’s ever been in his life. Luna is flitting silently around him, packing everything up. He follows her out of the tent. She collapses it and tucks every last item neatly in the tent pack, including everything he gave her and the hydration pack. There’s not even a chance for him to question it as she slides the straps over his arms and helps him settle the pack on his shoulders.
“It’s time for you to look for Katniss now,” she breathes, then scrambles out of the tree-cave. He tries to follow, slips, falls on his ass, scrambles up again. She’s gone.
He spins around on the lip of the bowl, staring wildly around the trees, thinking she must have gone swinging off expecting him to follow.
Then the cannon sounds.
He looks down.
Draco Malfoy’s sword is just completing its arc, blood streaming from the edge in a crimson wave. Luna Lovegood’s body is crumpling, because her head is tumbling to the ground.
Harry doesn’t even think, just whips his slingshot out and lets fly with golden sphere after golden sphere, raining shot after shot down on the ferret-faced blond fucking odds-damned murdering tribute and his companions. Draco drops his sword when a sphere shatters his wrist. He runs. Pansy looks up long enough to try and throw a knife at him and gets a black eye for her trouble. Marvel’s already running behind Draco.
Harry’s scrambling down the tree. Something is wrong with his vision, it’s all wavey like he’s underwater. There’s water on his cheeks too. Is it raining? Oh, no, he’s crying. He’s cradling Luna’s headless body and sobbing his heart out. The Careers are running right now, but they won’t be for long. He’s covered in Luna’s blood and his own tears and he has to move.
He grabs the sword automatically, wiping it off on the ground, and slides it into his belt as he sprints away in the opposite direction from the Careers.
“It’s time for you to look for Katniss now.” Luna’s last words play in his head on a loop. Each word is the beat of his feet along the ground as he runs. It’s. time. for. you. to. look. for. Katniss. now. Don’t look for Luna, because she’s dead. Look for Katniss. She’s still alive.
The sun has fully risen by the time he slows to a jog, then a walk, then a stop. He’s probably lucky he hasn’t been caught by someone. Except the last thing he feels right now is lucky.
Potter luck, he thinks, and sinks right to the ground.
Three and a half days ago, Luna Lovegood showed up, literally knocking at his door, and just… Kept him alive. Alive and… not happy, but… content. His pack is full of leftover meat and greens and herbs and even medicinals that she gathered, explaining how to identify and use them while talking to their nymphs. She stuffed him full of food, left him some to spare, climbed down a tree, then just… died.
“Draco Malfoy is going to die by his own fucking sword by the end of these Games,” Harry swears to the cameras.
It’s time to end his pity party, or at least postpone it, and get off the ground. He scrambles up the nearest tree and starts swinging and leaping, not even really paying attention to where he’s going. Luna gave him a three-day crash course in this method of travel and it's practically instinctive now.
The sun is high in the sky when he stops again. He’s somehow managed to make his way back to the stream; it’s just visible through the branches below. There’s blood drying on his clothes. He scrambles down the tree, down the bank of the stream, and carefully picks his way through the streambed until he finds a spot where the flow has cut under the bank and formed a sheltered little grotto of relatively still water.
There’s a gnarled root that makes a perfect hiding spot to lodge his pack. He lays right down in the water, a shelf of earth above his head and rocks digging into his back, letting the stream wash away Luna’s blood. If only his grief could be washed away so easily. He fiddles with the fleur-de-lis in his pocket, careful not to let it wash away too.
It’s time for him to look for Katniss now. His original plan was to stick by the stream and hope to run into her on her quest for water. Since Luna showed up, he’s been roaming a pretty limited range of the woods. There’s plenty of territory he hasn’t explored. He’s not even sure how much of the stream’s length he’s really seen.
The water is cold. Shivering, he pulls his pack back on and clambers out of the grotto and up the bank again. He scans the trees along the sides, looking for the highest, sturdiest contender. A massive pine about a quarter mile upstream looks perfect for getting a better view of the vicinity.
The branches at the top are thin, slimmer than his wrists, but he pulls his folded tarp out and wedges it up next to the trunk to make a somewhat comfortable seat. He very carefully removes his outer clothes and drapes them to dry on the branch in front of him. Then he starts his lookout.
The terrain appears to form a shallow valley with the stream at the bottom. It’s a bit hard to tell with how tightly packed all the trees are, but Harry thinks he can follow the course of the stream by the slight gaps and dips that are more common along a curvy line. It extends as far as he can see in both directions.
Something catches the corner of his eye. A pillar of smoke. He frowns. How is there someone left in the Games that’s stupid enough to light what amounts to a signal fire announcing their location? A moment later, another column of smoke starts winding its way through the treetops.
It’s a trap. It has to be. No one who’s made it this long is starting two smokey fires without an ulterior motive. It’s probably the Careers trying to lure in the other tributes, or… or it could be another tribute luring out the Careers.
It could be Katniss.
Luring the Careers out into the woods is definitely her style. She might be as impatient to see some action as the Gamemakers tend to get. If she has a ranged weapon, she can pick them off from the safety of the treetops. Harry knows he has the only bow from the Cornucopia, Luna told him when he showed it to her, but Katniss could have tried to make a bow, or at least a slingshot.
Harry’s not sure what to do about the fires. He doesn’t want to walk into the trap, if the Careers set it, or mess it up for Katniss, if she set it. While he’s trying to decide his next move, a third column of smoke becomes visible – this one massive, black and green and putrid looking, all the way beyond the trees near where he thinks the Cornucopia might be – right before a deafening BOOM nearly shakes him from his perch.
Holy fucking shitballs. Someone, somehow, just blew something up. Now Harry really has no idea who’s doing this. It might even be the Gamemakers. How could any of the tributes possibly have the means to create an explosion that size? The leaves are still vibrating with… secondary explosions? They’re like popcorn in a pan, gradually tapering off.
The mines, he realizes. He has no idea how, or who, or why, but the mines from around the launch plates have been detonated. They’re supposed to be deactivated after the countdown, but… it’s possible someone figured out how to reactivate them. Not Katniss, she’s gotten the same education he has and they do not cover bomb wiring in District 12, but…
Theo. The nerdy kid from 3. Where they make those mines. Wow. Harry clearly underestimated that kid.
Suddenly a lot of random shit Luna said about the Cornucopia’s bounty being moved, along with the magic protecting it, makes total sense. The Careers must have relocated all of the supplies from the Cornucopia after the bloodbath, and enlisted Theo to mine the area. And today, someone lured them all away from their cache and used their own boobytrap to destroy it.
This has Katniss written all over it.
Harry pulls his clothes back on rapidly and descends the tree. He scans the trunks around him until he finds what he’s looking for. He ascends another tree and puts his face right up to a knot that ripples – a camera under an eyelid.
“Luna Lovegood was a bloody fucking genius,” he enunciates, “and so is Katniss Everdeen.”
Some people might be stupid enough to run off and “check out the source of the explosion.” Harry is not one of them. He finds another oak – really, did the Gamemakers design these with his plan in mind? – and makes camp early, so he can focus on plotting.
Using a stick charred with his arc lighter, he draws a rough map on the tree bark. He only vaguely remembers the positions of the field and lake with respect to the Cornucopia, but he’s intimately familiar with the treeline, and now with the valley and stream. “X” marks the spot for the two signal fires he saw. Parallel and perpendicular to the stream, he marks out a search grid.
He stares at his map for a while, memorizing it, trying to recall whether he’s explored any of that territory before. Most of it, he doesn’t think he’s seen. There’s too damn much of these woods, but he has to try. For Luna, for himself, and most importantly, for Katniss. He has her bow, and she has his heart.
It’s time to find her and give her everything.