lost | the hunger games

• xxiv •

❝I have become something terrible.❞

fang runin, the poppy war

☾

Grief has my ribs crushed in its fist. Every day, I'm drowning in grief while fighting off the spiders trying to drag whoever's left with me. Whenever I close my eyes, it's another lost soul appearing behind my lids. Mags. Mom. Lucas. Ben.

My father. Amos, even though I never saw his body or how he died. Although Amos now has come back from the dead, a living ghost of my nightmares. In my dreams, I see Amos with his trident and Ben on the other end, blood dribbling from his mouth. Amos is urging me to take the trident in these dreams. But then I blink and it's me on the other end, and I can't breathe because blood is filling up my lungs until I wake up.

The dreams are always the same, just according to different people. And somewhere along the lines the shock blurred and . . . numbed. I could hear their screams like in the arena with Jabberjays but without a time limit. Seeing Mags across from me when I woke up wasn't a surprise, nor was waking up on the floor to a peaceful Ben watching me, clean of blood and free of pain. Every day death took a new form to torture me. Grief wasn't a feeling any more but something tangible. It melded with my chemical make up until all I did was eat, sleep, and breathe death. There was no mercy in the Capitol, not even in sleep.

After the day the hole in the wall closed, I never saw Peeta Mellark again. Not in passing the hallways or in the torture chamber. I could never even hear him in his cell. I was sure he had died, then, and that I was alone in my cell. So, he started joining my dreams of lost people, too. No one can tell me how long the hole was closed for—time was so hard to keep among the pain and delirium—but he plagued my dreams almost every night until the day in the President's building when I realized he was alive.

He is alive now, and just past the doorway.

The lights are blinding. Just from the open doorway I'm bathed in fluorescence. I take one more look at Haymitch, who's just far enough from me to be out of visibility. He nods, mouthing, calm. But his twitching body says anything but. I nod before stepping into the white room. I want to look around the room desperately, keenly aware of the one-way glass to the wall beside me, but the person strapped to the gurney in front of me takes all my focus.

Peeta. Blood rushes in my ears, drowning out any possible sound in the room. I haven't actually seen him since the Quarter Quell ended. I've heard him and talked to him and touched his fingers but we never fully saw each other in all those weeks we were in the Capitol. The only time I'd seen him was the day before our rescue, when he saved all of District Thirteen from the attack. The teams put make-up on his face and the chaos didn't allow me a good look at him. He looks horrible. His face is gaunt and thin-looking, with purple rimmed sunken eyes. I'd lost a significant amount of weight during that time, but it was nowhere near the drastic change in Peeta. He's gone from a strong, heavy build to skeleton. Even his blond hair dulled with a pale gray sheen.

I can tell Peeta was expecting another District Thirteen therapist or whoever else they thought could help him. His face morphs from contempt to shock with millimeters of movement. Peeta stares at me like he's seen a ghost. He seems to be doing the same thing I am and drinking the sight of me in. Disbelief and reproach shroud his sunken eyes but his lips are parted like he's having trouble breathing.

"Peeta Mellark." I try to say it the way old me would've said it. Like at the tribute parade. But what comes out is the Changed me, and I say it the way I said it every time he returned back to the cell: full of relief and a dead sense of humor because he was still there, alive.