Prologue
Katniss
"Everything is going to be okay."
The biggest lie ever.
Katniss Everdeen never grew up with the phrase 'once upon a time' starting her bedtime stories. Maybe it was because she grew up in District 12. Her dad, however, always made up stories for her, countless possibilities of everything that he could imagine; some filled with adventure, some filled with magic, some filled with a different reality than their own, that didn't include starving children and innocent people sent to fight to the death.
District twelve was a tough place to live and everyone knew it. You can't raise your children with princesses and miracles and the moment they walk through the front door, all those hopes and dreams are crushed into little pieces, can you?
The world was already tough as it was with the Hunger Games, they thought that was the time for survival but now; now they know what survival really meant. It was after all what really mattered – staying alive.
They had been stripped to mere beings, whose only bid now was to survive. Not much different than before if you ask her. Fighting to stay alive was a daily duty that she had been doing her whole life. The world broke in the most atrocious of ways. Now, there was no time for the weak.
Katniss Everdeen knew why she didn't grow up with happily ever afters.
Because they don't exist.