The next few days pass by peacefully. She wakes up every morning then goes on a walk by herself. By the time she gets back, Annie and Johanna are usually up and moving around the kitchen. Sometimes, she helps Annie cook breakfast too, although some food is usually wasted at first because she's unfamiliar with the ingredients being used. After packing lunch, they go to help out with the boats, then pick up Nick in the afternoon, before going home.
Mahi and Maya are both friendly to her when they see her around the District, and so is Gil. He's still been guiding her around occasionally, even after she rejected his invitation to have a drink together during her fifth day working. She's thankful for his friendship, and she can't help but think of Gale. He definitely would have acted all wounded, and probably would have avoided her for days on end. She hasn't spoken to him since the Rebellion, though, so even her idea on how he would react is just a guess.
Nobody from Twelve has called since the first day she arrived.
It's a thought that's been lingering in the back of her mind. She knows that that's what she wanted, but she didn't expect to feel so conflicted about it. On one hand, she feels grateful about the fact that they're respecting her wishes to be alone. On the other hand, she feels sad and lonely. She hasn't gone more than 3 days without speaking to Peeta since he came back from the Capitol all those months ago, and even though he's moved on with Sage, she'd thought of herself as his best friend. The fact that he hasn't attempted to contact her since then is somewhat depressing, because she didn't think her part in his life was so minuscule that he would be able to continue on like nothing has changed.
But each time she starts thinking darker thoughts, she tries to remember that she wanted this. That she's the one who ran away without saying anything, without even leaving a note. That she chose not to reveal her current location to him, and so he doesn't really know for sure that she's staying with Annie and Johanna, although she's sure Peeta suspects it. Her relationship with her mom is tenuous at best, and her friendship with Gale is almost nonexistent at this point. Annie and Johanna are the next closest people to her, and there's no one else left. She would have had nowhere to go if she hadn't come to Four.
The night air is cool, and she stares out into the dark, trying to think of literally anything else. Apart from the sounds of the water and some insects, it's completely silent. Annie explained a few days ago that while Four's Victor's Village is basically unoccupied, the residents refuse to stay in the houses out of respect. That is, unless the residents absolutely need to because they have nowhere else to go. Two houses are occupied so far, but the occupants have mostly stayed quiet, especially at night.
They haven't complained about her screams, either. The first time it happened a few days after she arrived, Jo had come running into the room gripping her axe, eyes wild. Annie had woken up, too, and her eyes were understanding when they landed on Katniss. Thankfully, Nick is proving to be a heavy sleeper, so her occasional nightmares haven't woken him up yet. She knows the night he wakes up to her screams will probably be her last day in the house, and she'll have to move somewhere else.
He's proven to be adorable, though. While she can see hints of Annie in his features and the way he moves, she can see a great deal more of Finnick in him, which she thinks Annie loves but feels pained by as well. He's gotten used to Katniss, too. While initially indifferent to her presence in the house, he's started reaching for her when he sees her, a large gummy smile on his face. Sometimes, he follows her around the room with a smile or laugh, and her heart just hurts. She misses her own Little Duck, especially when Nick does things like that. Prim would have loved playing with him; she loved kids as much as she loved helping people get better, and Katniss would always catch her playing games with Seam kids. Sometimes, some Merchant kids would join the games, too. Apart from the annual Hunger Games viewings, those were probably the only times when Katniss saw people from both sides of town mingling.
Prim was amazing in that way. People couldn't help but liked her, no matter what she looked like or where she was from. Merchant adults usually despised or ignored people from the Seam, but they'd go out of their way to give Prim something just to see her smile. Seam adults usually found Merchants condescending and avoided them, but they were always eager to make conversation with her. And all kids of all ages from both sides of Twelve loved Prim.
Everyone in Twelve used to get bullied at least once. Merchant kids would bully younger Seam kids, while Seam kids would bully younger Merchant kids. Everyone went through it. Katniss herself was bullied by a Merchant girl once; that girl stopped once Katniss threatened to shoot her.
Her sister, though, was never bullied. She just had something special that made everyone love her. Katniss would have hated her for it, but she loved Prim too, and so she understood. Even though Prim never wanted to try going into the forest with Katniss, and would rather spend her day playing with kids or healing people. Katniss always felt hurt each time Prim rejected her invitations to spend the day - at the forest in the beginning, and later, just invitations to waste the day away at home. Her days off were always rare; she usually needed to hunt or forage, so she wanted to spend time with Prim whenever she was free or too sore to go out. Prim was always busy, though, and would apologize with her large eyes that would urge Katniss to forgive her.
Katniss resented her for it sometimes, despite still loving her. Looking back now, she recognizes that her younger sister was just trying to make life more bearable for everyone in Twelve, which was why she was always busy helping people or playing with the younger kids. And whenever she wasn't busy, she'd spend time with Katniss, too. Even just by eating together, or talking at night, or arranging the medicinal herbs.
She hates that she didn't realize and appreciate everything Prim did for her - hates that up until the moment Prim died, Katniss thought that her sister didn't love her very much when in fact, Prim loved her a lot. She just showed her love by talking with Katniss while Katniss was cleaning animal carcasses, even though she hated seeing dead animals. Or by helping Katniss prepare to go into the woods in the mornings, even though she hated that Katniss needed to go there and spent a week crying about it at first, and still cried about it sometimes. And by staying with Katniss in Victor's Village all those days after her first Games, when she and Peeta weren't talking to each other.
Katniss didn't realize it then, but her usually busy sister was always in the house during those months, flitting from room to room and talking to Katniss with a smile on her face, bringing her new delicacies, cooking her new recipes, dragging her outside to the garden. She would push Katniss to help her with the few plants they had, with cooking the occasional dinner, with cleaning the house. All the things that helped Katniss get better and improve, the things that pushed her to get back into a routine and start doing things and try to move on. Which she did, until the Quell was announced and she was back in the thick of it.
And then Prim was there again, spending time with Katniss during the quiet hours in Thirteen, just sleeping beside her or sitting beside her or outside the room. Smiling at her during mealtimes, squeezing her hand whenever they passed each other in the halls, hugging her to sleep when Peeta was in the Capitol and she was beside herself. Skipping her beloved hours training in the medical area to be there for Katniss. Always, always there, until the day she died.
It was only after that when Katniss realized how much space Prim took up in her heart, how much Prim helped her, how Prim was such a large part of her. How her presence was everywhere, and now she was a ghost. Ghosts of Prim laughing outside the bakery windows, or cooking something at the stove, or planting something in the garden. Katniss tried for so long to distract herself from it and to stay numb, but then Peeta came back and she had to pretend again. And he didn't realize, because the only person Katniss had really shown her broken self to was Prim. Peeta was always only there in the aftermath, after some of the cracks had healed a bit. He didn't know what Katniss pretending would look like, and so she pretended for a year until they were good friends again and until Sage came and took her place in Peeta's heart and Katniss was pushed to the side and she couldn't take pretending anymore because it was all so tiring.
And so she ran away. She thought that she ran away because of Peeta and Sage, but now she knows that she ran away because she couldn't handle seeing Prim's ghost everywhere, in everything that she did. Because pretending was just making her more and more broken, until some of the cracks were too large to heal, and she just needed to be with other people who used to be broken but were already healing, and who wouldn't judge, and who she wouldn't feel too vulnerable with. And that was Annie and Johanna. They were broken, too. But they were healing and getting better, and she knew that she wouldn't jeopardize their progress.
But if Peeta knew about how she'd been cracking under a facade for months, nearly a year, she knew - knows - that his progress might have halted. That he might have even gotten a lot worse, and all because of her. Because she started pretending and never stopped while waiting for Prim to come back and heal her again, and it took Sage's arrival and relationship with Peeta to snap her out of it and make her realize that the world around her was moving. That people were moving on. And that Prim hadn't come back, and would never come back, because she was gone forever.
Her sister is dead, and she doesn't know how she can live with that. As she stares out into the night sky, she wonders if she even wants to learn how to live in a world without Prim - the person she loved most, in the end. And the person she failed the most.