This chapter has been reviewed and edited (May 2020). Nothing new, just fewer grammatical and spelling mistakes.


Mrs Everdeen

Lylia Everdeen watched as her youngest daughter played with her cat. She took a deep breath. Oh how she was tempted to just forget. To close her eyes and never open them again. To keep them open but just not see, let the world pass her by.

How long had she been wishing for time to just stop? Or if she had any say about the speed of time at all, how she wished it would speed back in time. To a time when she was happy. When she fell asleep every night in the strong arms of her wonderful husband. How she wished she could still spend hours listening to him as he sung the birds into silence.

A burst of laughter snapped her back into her kitchen. Her jaw tensed. She had almost let herself slip back again. Primrose looked at her, a smile on her lips and in her eyes as her hands twisted the length of rope Buttercup was trying to chase down.

Her daughter.

Her wonderful, beautiful daughter.

Lylia couldn't believe that she had almost let her die because of her own weakness. She was so weak. She knew how easy it would be to herself fall back into it, into her weakness. She hadn't known she was so weak before the mine destroyed her life.

And now one of her daughters was fighting death once more. Only this time, when she was willing to do anything to help, she couldn't. She couldn't do anything.

Her little girl would be fighting to survive, to not be killed, because she did the one thing Lylia couldn't do (not only by law but also because she wouldn't have been able to): she stepped up. Her daughter, her wonderful, strong daughter had chosen to risk her own death (or life, depending on how one viewed things) in order to save her little duck.

Did Lylia even have the right to call Katniss her daughter still? She hadn't been a mother to her in so long.

Oh how Lylia wished she could be like her. Like her strong Katniss, who resembled her father so much it hurt, who had ordered her to be a mother to Prim because she couldn't be here anymore.

Lylia clenched her jaws even tighter. She would do this. She would be Prim's mother once more. She would not betray her daughters this time. But oh, how painful it was. How hard it was.

Lylia had to remind herself every day that she had to do this. She didn't have a choice. And so, like every day since Katniss had saved her sister, Lylia forced herself back into her own life. She knew she would be tempted to slip back into nothingness again. But she would have to resist.

And resist she did, for today was the day they had to watch Katniss enter the arena for the first time.

So she watched. She did nothing but watch. She coulddo nothing but watch.

It was a miracle that she had not shed a single tear yet. She knew she couldn't. For Prim.

For Prim, who was forced to watch her sister whimper in agony when flames tore her flesh, who was forced to watch as her sister cried for her own death in that arena as the big brown eyes of little Rue dimmed and lost their light. Lylia could not cry.

Prim didn't cry.

Lylia watched, eyes dry but hands clenched so hard into her dress she almost tore the fabric. She watched everything happen in a blur.

She watched as Prim became her only daughter. Because she realized that the girl who left the arena with the boy and who would soon return to District 12 would not be her daughter. Not anymore. She would be a broken person.

Lylia almost let herself cry when she understood that. How cruel maybe to be thinking like that. But Lylia wasn't cruel. She just knew. Maybe she was still her mother after all, if she could just know like that. It didn't matter. It didn't matter that Lylia was somehow still Katniss' mother. Katniss would not be her daughter anymore.

Lylia mourned the hard truth that her daughter had lost her innocence. Her very age. Because whoever came out of the arena was not a 16 year old girl.

Lylia had witnessed it once. With Haymitch. She hadn't understood it at the time. Hadn't understood what had changed. Now she did. Now she understood. Haymitch. Katniss. Both had lost their innocence and now evolved in a different world. A world where children were killed by children. Only, those children were not children anymore. They were killers.

And now Lylia was terrified. She was terrified that her daughter, her baby, her wonderful Katniss would become like Haymitch. Like poor Haymitch who wished for nothing more than to just forget.

But then Lylia hoped. She hoped that maybe Katniss would overcome all this and retain a bit of her innocence and purity. Because she wasn't alone. She had Peeta. Maybe it would be enough.

For once Lylia didn't let herself be pulled into nothingness. Instead she let herself be pulled (and maybe pushed herself a bit too) into this hope. She let it took hold of her entire being.

Yes.

Her daughter would be alright. She wasn't alone. She had Peeta. There was nothing to fear.

(Lylia Everdeen let herself sink into weakness once more when she refused to acknowledge that deep down she knew, oh she knew that her strong daughter had been broken in a way that even the Mellark boy would never be able to fix.)