Liberosis - The Hunger Games

46

"Peeta?" Katniss whimpered; a trembling hand rested atop the man's still unmoving chest. Nothing greeted her but the tentative chirping of birds, hidden in the foliage. "Peeta!" She cried aloud, shaking his body with tears down her face.

Seventeen, a seventeen-year-old child was close to death. Peeta, as far as the world as concerned was as good as dead anyway, this young boy up against people with a million times more experience than him. Katniss was frantic, crying and screaming, beginning hopelessly for the boy to wake up.

"Finnick," Atlas said warily as he helped me roll to the side, "we need to-"

But Finnick was already pushing Katniss out of the way, she fell backward in shock and tumbled down the steep surface. She scrambled for her bow, fighting desperately to protect her friend as Finnick pinched his nose shut. In a moment of sheer stupidity, I tackled her back to the ground, just in time for Finnick to begin pressing down hard on Peeta's unmoving chest.

Resuscitation, to anyone from District Twelve, would be unfamiliar, you were as good as dead before you stopped breathing, half of them had been lost to starvation anyway. To those from District Four it was witnessed a multitude of times, drowning was a common cause of death in our parts, but if at least someone was experienced restarting the heart, the unlucky patient would at least have the comfort of dying of pneumonia in a hospital building.

It was either that or secondary drowning, an ailment we were all too familiar with. It was what had turned my sister into a shell, what caused Annie to snap. It had filled Finnick with guilt and shame for years, only adding to his already present nightmares.

The murder of Clementine Ford.

Finnick had tried to resuscitate her, he'd tried so hard and so long that her ribs snapped under his force. I held both Annie and Addison as Finnick tried to perform the impossible. But Clementine Ford was as good as dead, something in me knew that as I helped Finnick drag her out of the water.

Clementine, with her rich brown skin and silky dark hair, innocent doe eyes and a chirpy voice. Now those eyes had turned glassy, glazed over, lifeless. Her hair sopping wet and mangled from the seawater. She was a porcelain doll, even as her ribs shattered under Finnick's desperation to save her.

What could have become of her had she not protected her friends that night? If that night had never happened at all. Perhaps she, Annie and Addison would still be close, going out for breakfast- existing in a mundane bliss. She would have been free of the games by now, she may have even been married.

But something told me she would experience none of that beauty. Had Clementine Ford survived her drowning, she'd trudge to the docks like the rest of the District, feeding of a futile hope that one day, things might be different. Had she married, it would be a constant argument about growing a family, more mouths to feed, more children to sacrifice to the crucible of the games.

No. Clementine Ford would be equally as miserable in life as she had been in death.

A dark twisted part of me wondered if we were all better off dead anyway.

"Come on Peeta," he choked out as he continued pressing down on the man's chest. It was as if we could all hear the cannon readying itself in the distance, taunting us, laughing at our despair.

"Finn," I whispered soothingly, taking a step forward as he pushed down on the younger boy's chest relentlessly. If Katniss continued at the volume she was going, she would alert anyone in a ten-mile radius. We needed this to end, and we needed to keep moving. I cut myself off from speaking as Katniss suddenly wrapped her arms around my neck, sobbing and crying at the unmoving figure of her best friend.