PART THREE | THE VICTOR
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I see her. I see her dying. Exploding, her body ripping into millions of unfathomable pieces.
I see myself. I see me crying. Broken, my being falling apart all around me as I scream into the nightfall.
There... there she is again. Floating, her body motionless and still. Her eyes flickering and empty. She's screaming for help. She just wanted to save me.
There... there I am again. Grounded, my body writhing and agonising. My eyes bleeding and oozing. I'm silent with heartbreak. I just wanted to save her.
I wake in a sweat, but she's already gone. There's no use trying to do anything I said I would if she went. The sun is higher in the sky, meaning dawn has passed. She should be coming back soon, if she's still alive, that is.
Numbness spreads through me at my own helplessness, at the shock of the nightmares that raged my drug-addled sleep.
I hear a canon go off, and I feel panic rising so fast within me that I can't stop it. There are endless waves of it, and I can't breathe. Maybe I'm having a panic attack, but I don't know. All I know is that I'm panicking, hard. I'm falling through endless chasms of my own despair and all I can do is hope, hope for dear life that Katniss is alive.
Katniss... please, please be alive...
The illness takes me back into sleep again.
She bursts into the cave, blood pouring from her head. My vision is full of black spots. I feel death coming. It's really coming, now. But so is she. Or maybe it's just another dream.
Either way, I can slightly see a blurry version of her bursting into the cave, bloody and scared. She plunges a needle into my arm and I cry out in pain. Something tells me that in dreams, you don't feel pain. But I find it hard to believe, and the blackness is beginning to take me over again. The needle gets plunged deeper and deeper in my arm, blackening my vision more and before.
When she's done doing whatever she does, she collapses, and so do I.