A/N: Just a little one-shot I wrote on impulse.
-Joy
She can smell death in the air. She can feel it crawling around her form and constricting her body like a vice. She can feel the blood dripping off her hands. She can see the bodies laying all around. The people she called friends. The people who trusted her. She can hear them hissing her name as it drips off their tongues like venom.
She's afraid to take a step. She keeps her eyes closed as she lives in the darkness that surrounds her. She's afraid to open her eyes. She's afraid that she'll see everyone she loves dead on the cold ground.
The wind picks up and she feels it cold against her skin. She can smell the metallic scent of gore heavy in the wind. She keeps her eyes shut as she remains stalk still. Too afraid to see the people. But she opens them anyway.
And she gasps at the field of corpses that lay around her feet. Their eyes still open, but dead and cold. Their skin pale and lifeless. She killed them, she knows. It's her fault these people died.
She can hear her name being hissed in the air. Threats and insults. She's afraid to take a step as she stands in the cold wind, shivering. She turns around and finds more corpses and she begins to falter. She looks down at herself to find black leather and her bow.
Katniss Everdeen stands in her Mockingjay suit, bow in hand, in a field of corpses. The wind heavy and the fog disabling her to see well. She wonders how she got here. What brought her to the point where she stands with the dead. Where she doesn't have the faintest idea why they were fighting.
Why she was fighting.
"Look where you lay now! You're dead! Is this what you wanted?!" she screams at the air and her fists clench. Anger seizing her body and her jaw set. "What were you fighting for?!" she throws her bow down in disgust and it shatters before her eyes. She watches it evaporate.
She stares down at the gold pin resting on her chest and rips it off the black fabric, throwing it to the ground and watching it land on a child no younger than six years old. His eyes dark and his skin cold.
She begins to weep for her country.
But she can't cry; she can't produce tears. Her sobs come out dry and she breathes in the familiar scent of death.
She forces her legs to walk. She forces her eyes to look ahead. But she can't stop her sight from wavering to the ground to find the bodies of the people she was meant to protect. She can't stop the guilt she's felt so many times before as she stumbles upon a small child.
She wonders why she's in this state. Why is she walking on corpses. Why is she in a world with no end. What did she do to end up here.
Her eyes catch sight of a blonde braid and she shakes her in disbelief. And then the tears come in multitudes as she kneels in front of the body that once held the little girl called Primrose Everdeen. She can hear the wind and she can still her name, but her sobs out beat them all. Her blue eyes are frozen on the sky. Katniss reaches up her hand to drag her finger across her cheek and she finds it cold to the touch. She doubles over as she weeps onto her sister's stomach. Beating her fists on the ground, she screams in agony. She screams as the familiar pain chokes the life out of her. She screams because there is no reason not to scream. She screams as she finds the blood of her sister on her hands. She screams as she falls to the ground with a thud. Not making a sound as she screams internally.
She falls to her side. The thick grass laying underneath her body. She sees a hand next her; another body. She looks up to find the face of another person she's killed, but she finds the face of a person that tried to kill her.
Peeta.
She stifles the sob. She tries to stop the pain but she reaches up her hand to clutch his. She brings her body off the ground and lands by his cold body. His eyes that she once was reeled into, dark and eerie. Blood pours out of his side and she begins to scream again. She pulls his head into her lap and stretches his curls as she watches her tears create puddles on his pale face.
"I love you." she whispers. Her voice cracks and she sobs again. Hugging his body to her own. His blood leaking onto the black leather of her suit. His body once warm and inviting, now cold and dead.
Everything around her is dead. Everyone around her was killed by her hands. By her doing. Her sister, the boy that saved her life, dead at the hands of Katniss Everdeen.
She kisses his lips once more. She lingers as she tries to imagine how he would kiss her back. He would laugh, and take her breath away as kissed her again. She can almost feel his hands crawl up her back, but she draws back to find his lips blue and his skin cold.
She can't stop weeping.
She gently drops his body back to the ground and lays beside him. She watches what he saw before she killed him. She tries to imagine what he was thinking. How disgusted he was with her.
"Why are you here?!" she demands. Churning her head to find that blonde braid that belonged to her sister then the coldness of the boy she loved beside her. She raises her hands in front of her and watches the blood drip off of her fingers.
She begins to weep again.
Despair, agony, torture. This is what it feels like. The only people she loved, plus her entire country, dead by her side. Rotting on the ground.
It's all her fault.
She falls asleep clutching the cold hand of the boy who gave her life, but she gave him death.
She wakes with a start. Sweat trickles down her forehead and she instantly raises her body to a sitting position. She tries to breathe, but she stares at the door of her bedroom and knows she's back in Victor's Village. Alone in this big house. Alone in this empty bed.
She refuses to close her eyes, that will bring back the memories of the dead, she won't do that. She focuses on her breathing. She closes her mouth and relaxes her body.
She feels emptiness envelop her soul and she drops her face in her hands. She has no one to bring her to reality. She has no one to hold her. She can't get away from the nightmares.
A sharp pain shoots through her core and she yelps. Holding her stomach in her grasp she inhales sharply.
She's pregnant.
And she realizes that this pain is familiar. Something she's experienced before and the she connects the two and finds that her baby was kicking. The baby was letting her know that it was there.
She pauses for a moment and then turns around in her bed. She finds a very alive Peeta asleep. And then it all comes back to her in the monologue the doctors taught her to say when she got confused. Starting from the obvious things to the more confusing things.
She stares at her left hand for a moment. Finding a band that matches the one that is resting on Peeta's finger.
My name is Katniss Mellark. Peeta and I have been married for almost twenty years. I am pregnant with our second child. There are no more Games. I have a daughter. I was just dreaming.
She lays back down beside her husband and he stirs, resting his left hand on her swollen stomach. He pulls her close and she buries her head into his neck.