No Time to Die (A DSMP Hunger Games AU)

Screams

Screams.

They were a sound heard too often in the cramped, slum like conditions of District Twelve.

You'd hear them every day as a child dies from an infection that was easily treatable, or as a so called 'Peacekeeper' contradicts its name; one hit, two hits, three hits until you're cowering on the floor purely for asking for another ration of bread, for looking at them the wrong way.

George had gotten used to the sounds rather fast. It's hard not to.

For years he would listen to the screams of grieving wives in the streets as another husband suffocated in a mine so unstable no one should never have been sent down into. Children fatherless and alone.

He'd never thought he'd have to go through it himself. But of course in the twisted way the sick world works no one is free. So neither was he.

In his mind his mother's screams were the worst. Heaving sobs as she crawled at the rubble of the collapsed mine or the ones that would wake him up late into the night. When she would stay up till she thought George and his sister were asleep till she could sob and sob till her throat was raw and dry.

The silence was worse though.

It was so much worse.

There was a time when she just stopped. At a point everyone has to. But even when the screams stopped there was something blank in her eye.

At least when screaming she had seemed to have emotions.

Now instead she left them with a cold suffocating silence. Stark periods where she would sink back into her sorrows and leave George to cater for them.

No matter how much he heard them though, how easily he could blank a face, turn a blind eye and walk on, he still hated hearing the screams.

Especially when they came from his sister.

On this particular night her screams echoed through the small, cramped house as George shot up in bed, sweat dripping down his neck like icicles as his groggy mind located the origin of the sound. It took a desperate stumble for him to get out of his covers, shaken legs hitting against a cold wooden floor.

Their mother wouldn't comfort her, god knows she was held up with her own nightmares. Not that George wasn't, no, he some nights would wake up in a cold sweat, nightmares of the reaping, of the images of mangled children bleeding out on a projection screen.

He'd be surprised if anyone in the god forsaken district was free from the terrors that enveloped them when night took over.

"Leah?" He called, half running into his sisters room where she sat, curled into a ball on one corner of her bed, as if she curled herself in hard enough she could simply disappear - remove herself from this hell scape and wake up in a simpler world. A world of full stomaches and warm smiles. A world not so tainted with red.

He couldn't blame her, and even in the darkness he could see the tears rolling down her cheeks as he approached, footsteps too loud against the creaking wood.

He remembered being the exact same on his first reaping. A scared twelve year old crying into his blankets. It had only been a few months since the death of his father, and there he was with a ghost of a mother, and a seven year old sister.

There was no comfort to be met when he had woke up those nights. There were no arms to wrap around him like he did with his sister, no comforting words whispered to him.

No.

He had been alone.

So alone.

"You alright Lea?" He asked, pressing a kiss into his younger sisters head as she cried into his arms.