Author's note: This is just a quick one-shot drabble. I had no homework this weekend (YES!) and thought I'd write something. Not sure if I'll continue this one. Enough of my babbling! You didn't come here to read my digressions! On with the story!
-IAmEverdeen98
Perfection. This is what he appears to be. Sensitive. Sweet. Beautiful. Talented. Loves me with his whole being, it appears. And I could never deserve him, not in a lifetime of cheating and lying to try and keep my head above water. And I love him, but it will never equal what he's doing for me. All I see when we're together is how selfless he is, and what a perfect opposite I am.
Selflessness. This is his flaw. I could probably do whatever I wanted to him, and he'd follow like an injured, but loyal dog. This is what puts him so far above me, what keeps him reaching down to pull me up with him. It's why I have to run away to where he can't reach me anymore, so this awful guilt eating my insides like a carefully crafted Capitol acid poison. Maybe if I stayed out here, with the bare trees trembling in the biting wind and the silencing powder on the forest floor.
I turn my eyes to the gray sky, matching them with my own gray irises. The fine branches stand against the sky like the fine ink lines in the book of knowledge he's splashed with color. I can't stand the sight and turn away, choosing instead to dig in my game bag filled with food for some form of breakfast. After brushing past tin cans of lentil soup from the store (for the family that just had their mother die; besides, I can't open the cans) and the bags of dried game jerky that I shot, I pull out a crumbly thing I grabbed in my rush out the door. Rescuing the item from the bottom of the bag, I find a crumbly, deformed cheese roll. My favorite. He makes them for me all the time now.
I throw the roll into a nearby shrub, cringing as I hear the crunch of leaves and the harried footfalls of animals I scared out of the bush. I cannot escape the boy with the bread. The boy I will never cease to regret meeting. The boy I will never stop loving. The boy who will never leave me. Too troubled to eat, I reach instead for the flask of herbal tea that reminds me of days gone by, days where I relied only on my best friend and myself, days where life was hard, but simple and not filmed by freaks and seen by all.
I clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air. My muscles are clenched tight against the cold. If a pack of wild dogs were to appear at this moment, the odds of scaling a tree before they attacked are not in my favor…
