Hello there! This is my first Hunger games fic, set about a year after Mockingjay. I'm new to the Hunger games books (I must have been living under a rock or something) Any way I totally love them and I couldn't get the idea for this fic out of my head! Please ignore any mistakes I did proof read but my attention to detail leaves much to be desired to say the least!
I hope you enjoy reading this!
"Katniss... Help me!" The all too familiar screams coursed through my veins again. I scour the abyss looking for the source of the cries. Then I see her, it's Prim, stood in a far corner of what appears to be the district 12. Then above the screams comes an over powering drone, hovercrafts, they're coming ever closer, closer to me, closer to my new found home, but more importantly, closer to Prim. "Run Prim, run!" I project as loud as my lungs would let me, but she can't run... My exhausted excuses for legs won't carry me to her, I fight them as hard as I can but the more I try to move,the less I can, my muscles becoming ever more ridged. The hover crafts bear ever closer, I see the load they have planned to drop. I scream to her one last time, "Prim, look out" and almost instantaneously the first craft dropped its load. You know, they say things like this happen in slow motion, and they really do. I numbly witness the bomb falling from the sky, it was almost graceful. That still sort of graceful, I watched it fall for what felt like an eternity, mesmerised, yet paralysed with fear. The muffled terror of Prim's final cries awoke me from the state of memorisation I had lapsed into. She too was looking at the crafts offspring. It was falling just metres away from her, it would kill her in an instant, I would be left without my sweet Prim. The Prim I played with as a baby, the Prim I'd taught the hanging tree song to which lead my mother to freak out, the Prim that had her little duck tail the day of the first reaping, the Prim that he grown into a marvellous young woman whilst I was away, the ambitious young healer. One long lasting wail was the last thing to come from her mouth, "Katniss", the last scream that has resonated my thoughts for so long. It seems to take an eternity for the bomb to hit, but on impact it jolts me from my slumber.
I am awake. It was all a dream. A nightmare. My skin's clammy, I'm warm, but shaking in my bed, I'm fractionally eased by the fact it was a dream, yet plagued by the thoughts that it wasn't all a dream. I had still lost my Prim, sweet gentle Prim. Even thinking of her name evokes feelings deep inside me. Feelings of sorrow, not just the sadness you feel when you loose an inanimate object with no real meaning to it, or the slight melancholy feeling you get leaving a friend you may not see for a while. This is a real gut wrenching sorrow, the feeling that makes it harder to breath, the feeling that tightens your insides and makes them feel like jelly sliding across a plate. These dreams, you'd have thought, would have got a lot less poignant over the past few weeks, but they don't. It's like it's happening all over again, that I'm loosing her for the first time all over again.
But I'm not, that's not even how she died, we were never even in a situation like that. Even though the war is over, mine isn't, me against my mind, my deepest thoughts, who knows if it will ever be over. Who knows if I'll ever be fixed. They say once people are broken in certain ways, they can never be fixed. I disagree. Peeta was broken, now besides the occasional cling to the back of the sofa, he is fixed. Yet there's no denying that Prim can never be fixed, but then I guess she's gone, not broken, gone, there must be some kind of difference. Maybe I'm broken in a way that can't be fixed, maybe I'll never get over her terror filled cries, maybe I'll never be able to fall asleep again would seeing her slip away in front of me. It suddenly gets harder to breathe, as I realise again to myself that she's never coming back. As I try my hardest to regain control of my breathing, something I've had a lot of practise at recently, I stir Peeta slightly, not enough to wake him fully, but enough to make him aware of me. He subconsciously slipped his arm round my waste and gently caressed the exposed skin on my stomach, I hadn't even noticed it was exposed until he touched it, it wouldn't be the first time though that my nightmares had left my thrashing about, disrupting the position of my night shirt and I can guarantee that it won't be the last time. That's what ceases to amaze me about Peeta, he knows me better than I do, even when he's sleeping he's still trying to protect me, maybe Gale was right, maybe I can't survive without him, I've experienced the bleak nothingness of life without him and maybe I couldn't survive without him. It's almost shameful really, that someone could mean that much to you that without them you feel like nothing, yet it took almost loosing them to make you realise what they mean to you. But I didn't loose Peeta, he's right here next to me, his soft breathing in my ear, almost like a lullaby. I'm scared to fall back to sleep, I'm scared I'll loose her again, but I need sleep. The internal turmoil is won by my growing need for worthwhile rest, I can't keep going on like a zombie.
To keep away from the unsavoury terrors that plague my sleep I focus on the one thing that means the world to me, the one thing Snow, though he tried, could not take away from me, Peeta. The thumb he was gently stroking me with was one of the only parts of his hands not to be burned, and though the doctors in The Capitol did a good job of fixing us both up there was no disputing the difference between the two. The sensation takes me back to the rebellion, though that times the tables were turned, I was softly stroking Peeta's hair whilst he slept on the mission. The mission just brings back more haunting recollections, more faces of those to haunt my thoughts, the faces of those that had been and gone, the faces that I was responsible for killing. I too nearly killed Peeta with my bow that night under ground, when he was trying to protect me, though he has long forgotten that incident I haven't, I can't. I feel a wave of guilt wash over my body. I nestle closer in to Peeta's body and he too pulls me in tighter. He's woken more now, enough to utter the words that break the deafening silence, "It's okay Katniss, it just a dream, I'm here" he whispered in a hushed tone. I snuggle down into his embrace, finding security in his grasp.
Thank you very much if you read all of that and put up with my terrible writing... I do have some more of this story written but I'm in two minds wether to leave it as a one shot or continue it as a chapter fic. Leave me a review if you want and tell me what you though!
MD