She flinched when the bread hit her face. It didn’t hit hard, but she still looked like she might cry. Just one of those twitchy types. Cato leaned back on his elbows and watched her, sneering.
“Eat up, Rabbit,” Marvel drawled from across the fire. “Wouldn’t want you to starve. Who else is gonna patch up our wounds when we have to start spilling real blood?”
She didn’t respond. Just pulled the crust of bread into her lap with trembling hands, knees pulled up under her chin. Always curled up like that, like she was trying to disappear into herself. It annoyed him at first—how small she was, how soft. Why the hell would someone like her volunteer? She hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t. Just unlucky.
District Ten or Eleven or something useless. Good with plants, maybe. She’d mumbled something about antiseptic roots when Glimmer got a cut the first night. That had gotten her shoved into the dirt and called a know-it-all. She still patched the wound. No thank you. No eye contact. Just did it, quiet and efficient.
Cato only kept her because of that. Well, and because she reminded him of a rabbit.
That’s what Marvel had called her first, and it stuck. “She twitches when you move too fast. Bet she’d have a heart attack if someone threw a rock her way.”
She did twitch. Jumped even when the wind picked up too fast, or someone shifted their weapon. Her nose crinkled like she smelled fear in the air. She did everything scared. Ate scared, walked scared, slept scared—when they let her sleep.
Sometimes she’d be curled in on herself at night, trembling too hard to keep quiet. Clove would elbow her, hard. “Keep that up and I’ll gut you in your sleep, Rabbit.”
Still, she stayed.
That’s what started bothering him. He’d seen tributes break faster. Hell, some of them threw themselves into the bloodbath just to get it over with. But her? She stayed. She bled, bruised, cried—but every morning, she’d blink up at them with that hollow-eyed softness and still offer to help.
Once, Glimmer had dumped her entire canteen over the dirt on purpose. The girl had watched it soak away, then offered Marvel a leaf for his sunburn.
“You’re a freak,” Clove had snarled.
Cato hadn’t said anything then. He’d been watching. Watching how her fingers moved over wounds, how she found water better than any of them. Watching her ribs start to show, how her mouth cracked from dehydration, and she still tried to wrap Clove’s wrist when she twisted it falling off a ridge.
He’d snapped at her, too. Once she’d taken too long picking a plant and he’d slammed her back into a tree, low and fast. “You don’t get to take your time, Rabbit. You don’t get to slow us down. You're alive because I let you be.”
She’d nodded. Quiet. Like she agreed.
Later that night, she wrapped his hand when he sliced his palm open on a jagged stone. Didn’t say anything about it. Just cleaned the wound, slow and careful, like he wasn’t the one who nearly knocked the air out of her lungs hours ago.
What the hell was wrong with her?
“Why do you let her hang around?” Clove asked one night when Rabbit wasn’t in earshot. Probably looking for berries again. “She’s not gonna last another week. Dead weight.”
“She finds stuff,” Cato muttered. “And she knows medicine.”
“She’s pathetic,” Glimmer said, yawning. “I bet she cries when she steps on bugs.”
Marvel smirked. “I bet she cries when she breathes. Sweet little Rabbit.” He laughed. “Bet she’d let you do anything if you said please. I mean, she flinched when I touched her arm yesterday.”
Cato hadn’t liked that.
He didn’t say it, but something in his stomach twisted. Not because Marvel touched her—who cared? It was the way Marvel looked when he said it. Like Rabbit wasn’t even human.
Cato didn’t know when it started bothering him. Maybe it was the third night she passed out from heatstroke and they left her there. He circled back for her an hour later, pissed at himself the whole time. Maybe it was when she started keeping the bruises hidden— still treating their wounds without asking for anything in return.