I, uh, don't really know where this came from, to be honest. I kinda like it though, so in retrospect, I hope you guys like it too and if you do, please drop a review for me because I love them oh so much!
It's not normal, how he sees her sometimes.
She appears to him in flashes. Brief, frozen images of the past come back to haunt him. There are times when he'll see her long blonde hair disappear around a corner, the striking hue of her blue eyes on someone else's face – maybe he's even heard the sound of her laugh a couple times, but of that he can't be quite certain, because it's always gone as soon as it comes, often leaving him visibly shaken for hours and evidently questioning his own sanity.
If he didn't know better, he'd almost think she were real.
But, of course, she's not and never will be again – unless he's asleep because in the hazy state of his subconscious, she might as well be. When he touches her, he can feel her pulse jump under his fingertips, can see the way her eyes ignite when she looks at him, but when she opens her mouth to speak, something in the air just shifts. Whatever shard of happiness his foolish mind conjures at just seeing her diminishes because it's always the same words that come out of her mouth and they never fail to turn his dreams to nightmares each and every night.
"Why did you let them kill me, Haymitch?" She asks, voice magnified in a way that reminds him that she's not real but it never matters because he always just stands there helplessly anyway, wishing for a way to stop the buildup of tears behind her otherwise lifeless blue eyes.
But as soon as he reaches out to her, the image always changes – before he knows it, she's lying in blood spattered grass, skewered through the neck and dying all over again.
More often than not, he wakes up in a cold sweat. Sometimes screaming, sometimes even crying for the girl that he's lost and re-lost so many times since he was just sixteen years old.
Either way though, he always reaches for the bottle on his bedside table. Because yeah, he's a drunk – but it's just that much easier to drink away his problems than to live with seeing her face everywhere instead.