It's too bright.
Everything bubbles and blurs.
I can't move.
…
…
…
breathe
…
…
…
Destroying the arena.
I have to fight my way out.
I am choking.
I can't...
…
…
breathe...
…
…
Destroy...
...everything shatters.
My face hurts.
…
my arm snaps one way and the other.
I'm so thirsty.
I can't move.
It's dark.
The room is dark.
"Johanna?"
There's no one there.
This room is smaller.
I can almost reach the other side with my leg.
My face throbs.
I can taste blood.
Some one comes in.
Water is thrown on me.
I'm hit with the bucket.
…
…
breathe.
The lights flash on
and off
and on again
The get brighter and brighter
The sky shatters.
I'm covered in blood and my skin is blistering.
Running, falling, stumbling, crawling. Have to get further away. It'll stop hurting. Can't get away from your own skin. Somewhere up ahead, hopefully, the fog will be gone and there will be some rest. It can't go on forever. That would be a bad game. My leg is caught. A root? A hand? The fog is coming. The hand is full of blisters. It's owner screams, a gurgling sound, gray hair, twitching. Another hand pulling on my arm, dragging me forward. I manage to find a strong root on the ground, brace, pull myself to my feet, pull back from them. Sword. Block the sword.
Destroy.
Why is there so much?
Everything is red as I stab Chaff's blade into Brutus' again and again there's so much red, but it's not Brutus, it's Enobaria, it's Cato, it's Finnick, it's my mother, it's the girl with the braid.
It's Katniss.
No.
I can't. I can't. I can't.
I'm hanging from the wall.
Everything is red.
Are you coming to the tree?
My chest is burning.
His face is close to my face.
"We still have a long way to go. You can't sleep yet."
I feel I should spit at him so I do.
Or try.
There is no spit.
His face cracks a smile.
He fiddles with something.
There's that burn again.
Burning through my chest.
It's going to go right through me until I'm ash on the floor.
But the arena is full again. Brutus trying to kill me. I remember stabbing him, stabbing Enobaria, no, no the girl with the braid.
Katniss.
There is so much blood already.
I can't.
I can't.
She hits me in the face. Goes for my throat but I grab her wrist and push her back from me. She stumbles backwards, but comes back at me with a blade and it's Brutus again and this happened. I remember the red rage.
I shouldn't be in a tunnel. I was just—
It's dark, metal, a metal place, sirens, loud, so much noise. I can't breathe, dust, coal, everything is fire and coal, and she's there, cackling.
You can't trust her.
I remember the claws. The fire. The broken bones.
She'll be the death of us all.
She's walking through rubble, stepping on burnt skulls.
Crush.
Crush.
Destroy.
The Girl on Fire.
I can't.
I can't breathe.
I'm scrabbling at my neck, trying to release whatever has hold on me.
It's tight and getting tighter.
Slick and wet.
Everything begins to flicker, bubbles before my eyes, as I'm pulled backwards by the cords...or vines, whatever is around my throat, but I can't scream. I'm falling though, through glass that's breaking, falling onto the floor. She's looking down on me from above, worried that she kicked me out of bed. The train ride is too smooth for it to have been something there. I normally sleep better when we're together. We both do. She reaches to pull me up.
"Behave you two!" Haymitch from the doorway, "or keep the door closed if you're not going to!" He slides it shut.
She yells at him to not be an ass.
Everything breaks apart again.
Running.
Running.
Pain in my leg.
"Come back, lover boy!"
Buzzing. There's flying death all around. Stinging. Too close.
We need to leave.
We have to go. There are too many thought but I can see—I can see how to tear through, places to to bed, things to snap and twist, what to rip, and break and tear and soon it's just me and the debris and one clear path through the red and broken.
Again.
Again.
Again, until I don't stop when I notice that she is in the many and I don't care.
Thanks everyone for reading, for your kind comments, and your support.
I appreciate it very much. I now like to have a lot of a story (if not all of it) written before I start posting and a clear map of where it's going (if I don't), because I have, in the past, wound up leaving people hanging for a great deal of time without updates on things and I feel awful when I do that. It took me YEARS to finish Masses for the Masses because of how things went, and I don't want to do something like that again...
I have another story ready to go which is thankfully in a slightly happier place. It's hard with THG because it's such a dramatic universe and there's just SO much angsty type emotion most of the time compared to a universe such as, say, Sailor Moon or something where there is more a breather, but the next story is set between the first and second books, so there's that, at least; and another I'm writing which is during Catching Fire which I'll post up following on given that'll be a nice breather while I sort out what I'm doing with the one that would follow directly on from this given it's much harder work writing Peeta in this state of mind as you might imagine...and I kind of have scene 1 and then scene...maybe 25-38 and then 35 which are all rather canon divergent which is partly my Johanna's fault she is sort of obnoxious that way so yeah...
Anyway, thank you all again!
Echo
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