Living Lies ✜ Hunger Games x Reader

Epilogue

~7 Years Later~

*****

When one sense is lost, or turned off, the other four will strengthen themselves to make up on the loss. So when you close your eyes, you hear so much clearer, smell more deeply, feel more intimately, and taste everything more vividly. It's an escape, of sorts.

Closing your eyes is how you cope. Forcing the other senses to feel more, smell more, hear more, is grounding; you've learned to adapt to make your surroundings ground you, especially in times of anxiety or stress. It's taken a long time, years, but perfecting something usually does. So you take a deep breath, irises flickering behind your closed eyelids, and absorb it. Your surroundings, everything around you, everything that's tangible, and real, and here now. Your nightmares aren't. They have no power over you--not to any great extent, at least--not anymore.

The first thing that hits you is smell. So much of your life was filled with detestable aromas. You grew up in the Seam--coal was what was burned, the fumes were what you always smelled. That's what sticks out to you most; you, a little girl, no older than 7, your dad coming home, smelling like a coal miner, much opposed to the clean smelling cloth that your mother worked with as a seamstress. And in the later years, when your father was ill and your mother's fingers couldn't quite whip a stitch like they used to, the pungent smell of death was present often. The animals you killed to survive, the dead tributes in the Games, all of the fallen soldiers on both sides of the Rebellion. So many innocents. 

But here, in this tragically beautiful home that you've made for yourself, life is coming back. The meadow you sit in is wild and ungroomed, the flowers just opening up to the world, bright and beautiful as always and never underappreciated for their scent. The wind has just breathed over the lake, carrying with it all of the good and bad smells of the lake, its earthiness and blooming plants. The air carries a damp tinge to it, as if it might rain later, but when your eyes were open earlier you had detected no rain clouds. 

Next, you focus on touch. Normally, you try not to grope around you too much, lest you find something unpleasant like a caterpillar or spider and accidentally squish it. Instead, you prefer to ghost your hands around the stalks of meadow grass, plucking a strand or two. Maybe braid it and laugh at it later when you open your eyes and see the failed attempt.

And lastly, sound, because you're rather uncomfortable with the thought of tasting some unknown, foreign thing out here in the meadow by yourself. Sounds may just be your favorite of the grounding senses; maybe it's because you once lost it in the Games, and learned the value of it. But you mostly attribute it to the fact that you had been around so many worse sounds--explosions, screams. Much better are what you hear now. The sound of water gently lapping at the shore of the lake. The soft whoosh of the wind in the tree and over the meadow grass. The whir of birds buzzing about and their occasionally loud, but for the most part soothing chirps and songs. You haven't thought about Mockingjays a lot, let alone Phoenixes, but you'll see the imitator around in the woods every once and a while. But you never say anything to them, and they, in return, never say anything back to you. 

Almost regretfully, you open your eyes. The only thing you dislike about having your eyes closed is that it makes you feel vulnerable, and after many years of always being on the look out, and on edge, vulnerability isn't a feeling that you particularly enjoy experiencing.

The meadow is green, because it's Spring and everything is full of new life, and the tops of the grass are poised like tiny dancers ready to break into motion at any stiff wave of the wind. It ripples like the cool blue of the lake water, a fish or two popping up onto the surface and creating slight undulations across the surface.  It's about evening now, and the sun is sinking further into the sky behind the lake, a few clouds drifting in front, bathed in an orange glow. The sky is tinted pink and purple and gold, as if somebody merely loaded a paintbrush full of sunset colors and streaked it across the sky without a care in the world, because they knew it would turn out beautiful no matter how they held the brush.