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are we out of the woods
Feb. 21st, 2016 03:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
burn_with_usRunning, running, running.
Katniss hasn't slept in days. The nightmares come and go but since Peeta left, she hasn't had the long stretches of relief that she'd had with him. The nightmares always come back. This run is particularly bad, as she hasn't slept more than a few hours in the last week. Her eyes are red-rimmed from tears and exhaustion and deep bruises beneath them show just how hard this has been on her. She's been trying to keep moving, to push herself to physical exhaustion so that the sleep she gets is dreamless. It doesn't work as well as she wants it to.
She's afraid of the doors but it isn't something she ever wants to admit out loud. She knows there's ones she can trust, ones that lead to safe places, but what if the doors change and she winds up in the Arena again? What if she winds up in the Capitol, instead, or in bombed out 12? The 12 of her dreams is never the one where she hunted with Gale or traded at The Hob. It's always the firebombed 12, the one where the walkways are paved with the bones of the people she couldn't save and where the air is scented with ashes and white roses.
Are we in the clear yet?
Today, she's working in the restaurant, bussing tables and taking orders and trying to keep afloat. Her mind is too tired to do the mental gymnastics her job requires and she drops two whole trays of glasses before the middle of her shift, glass slicing her palms as she picks it up. Still, she can't go to sleep. Sleep is where Snow can get her, where the mutts are after her, where the faces of all the people she's failed swim in front of her and scream at her in the harsh, metallic voices of jabberjays.
The buzz of the people dining starts to sound like Prim, like Peeta, like Rue. She can't take it any longer. Katniss runs, runs far back into a storage closet at the other end of the restaurant and hides. It's not her closet in 13 and it doesn't have piles and piles of smooth graphite pencils for her to break but it's good enough. It's quiet and it's dark and it's far away from everyone else.
[Feel free to have seen Katniss drop the glasses or if you're a canonmate, to know she's been having a hard time lately.]
Katniss hasn't slept in days. The nightmares come and go but since Peeta left, she hasn't had the long stretches of relief that she'd had with him. The nightmares always come back. This run is particularly bad, as she hasn't slept more than a few hours in the last week. Her eyes are red-rimmed from tears and exhaustion and deep bruises beneath them show just how hard this has been on her. She's been trying to keep moving, to push herself to physical exhaustion so that the sleep she gets is dreamless. It doesn't work as well as she wants it to.
She's afraid of the doors but it isn't something she ever wants to admit out loud. She knows there's ones she can trust, ones that lead to safe places, but what if the doors change and she winds up in the Arena again? What if she winds up in the Capitol, instead, or in bombed out 12? The 12 of her dreams is never the one where she hunted with Gale or traded at The Hob. It's always the firebombed 12, the one where the walkways are paved with the bones of the people she couldn't save and where the air is scented with ashes and white roses.
Are we in the clear yet?
Today, she's working in the restaurant, bussing tables and taking orders and trying to keep afloat. Her mind is too tired to do the mental gymnastics her job requires and she drops two whole trays of glasses before the middle of her shift, glass slicing her palms as she picks it up. Still, she can't go to sleep. Sleep is where Snow can get her, where the mutts are after her, where the faces of all the people she's failed swim in front of her and scream at her in the harsh, metallic voices of jabberjays.
The buzz of the people dining starts to sound like Prim, like Peeta, like Rue. She can't take it any longer. Katniss runs, runs far back into a storage closet at the other end of the restaurant and hides. It's not her closet in 13 and it doesn't have piles and piles of smooth graphite pencils for her to break but it's good enough. It's quiet and it's dark and it's far away from everyone else.
[Feel free to have seen Katniss drop the glasses or if you're a canonmate, to know she's been having a hard time lately.]