Without a sound, she walks through the empty house. Sometimes, she has little fits. Nothing like his. She tears her hair and cries little hiccupping sobs. For him. For everyone else she's lost.
She's trapped in the house, like a pebble on a box that's being rattled. Too much space around her to feel at home.
She grabs her bow and sprints to the woods.
There's so much chaos in the woods. Twisting roots and dead and dying trees. Too much color. Too much scattered light.
She throws back her head and screams, until she can feel it in her stomach and legs and feet; it encompasses her whole body. Birds startle and take to the sky. She shoots one, in a fluid movement of knocking and arrow and drawing it back. It lands forty feet away with a heavy thud. She only breathes through her noise.
"Come back." she orders to the sky, her voice ragged and demanding. She isn't begging. "You can't just leave me like this."
She sees a squirrel perched on a branch. Fuming, she draws her bow and shoots it, clean in the eye. She's so mad she passed distracted and went back to focused, the fire in her melting away everything else. She just needs one task to throw herself into, to possess her, and she'll forget.
"We were supposed to help each other." She yelps in disbelief.
"Peeta!" she screams. No answer. The forest is still.
Katniss waits, for what seems like hours, for an answer. Her feet at planted in their places.
Finally, she surrenders, gathering her slain prey, and retreats.
…
..
…
She interrogates Haymitch, who has no answer. "If I knew, I'd have no problem telling you. If I see him, he will be taught a lesson."
She uses his phone to call Gale. No answer, literally. He doesn't pick up. She checks Peeta's house, something she should have done first, but it is empty. He vanished.
She makes her way, defeated, into the house. She kicks off her boots, throwing one against the wall. Another retreat.
She slumps in a chair and watches the sun set. She resents Peeta. She misses him. She hates him. She hopes he never comes back. She wants him to walk through the door, apologizing and kissing her. She worries if he's hurt. She pictures herself caring for him, cradling him to her bosom as she nurses him back to health. She imagines him perfectly fine, and sees them not being able to speak to each other when he comes back. She pictures him far away and missing her. She sees him in another life, with a happy blushing bride and babies and a nice bakery and a life without her sour face and mad brain. She resents him for it.
Can she forgive him for leaving, even if he comes back? She doesn't feel any better. He has a permanent stranglehold on her, in his absence. She can't breathe.
It takes her a while to realize she's been sitting in the dark for an hour. This makes her so mad she screams.
She stumbles through the house with no lights on. A miscalculated step leads to the corner of a low table smacking the corner into her shin. She curses loudly, with a little more volume than necessary. She blames Peeta for it.
After stumbling her way into the bedroom, she falls onto the bed, gripping her leg and cursing angrily. Blood has flowed down her shin and ankle, the steady stream of it making a red tree shape as it flows down her foot. A dramatic injury, not nearly as painful as anything else she'd been through.
She doesn't think to get something to stop the bleeding, or to keep the blood from getting anywhere. She just crawls to prop herself up on the headboard and bursts into tears. She sobs heavily, taking shaky breaths.
She lets her head fall back against the wall. Her bloody hands are useless at her sides. Every muscle of her body has been tensed since she woke up and he wasn't there. She's so tired. She only wants to protect him and she doesn't even know where he is.
She closes her eyes and they stay closed until she loses track of time.
She doesn't hear the footsteps on the stairs.
