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A loud gasp rang through the hollowness of the bedroom, a room that once used to be shared by two children instead of one, a space that once lived with the laughter and bickering of two siblings. But now it was haunted with night terrors, the vast emptiness except for her own breathing.
The girl's hands had been fast to brush the thin sheets to the side and for her feet to scramble and meet the cold wood, blue eyes searching the room for Ryle but for them to find the emptiness the corner held where once used to be a single bed. Her lungs were heaving for air, the tightness of her chest growing.
It had been another night she watched her brother die by the hands of the Capitol and the puppets the children became within their arena simply made for entertainment but for the mourners to suffer. Another morning she would wake to find the nightmares hadn't been dreams but tormenting truth.
Gwenith had long forgotten what day it was, for that short minute as she had tried to recollect her thoughts. To calm the heartbeat that tried to burst out of her chest, she had forgotten it had been the fourth of July.
And her eyes shifted to the awakening skies outside the window, another break of dawn upon them which she would spend her day harvesting in the wheat fields as the sun would scorch down upon them, another day of stares in her classes. She couldn't have known she would come to face the same fate as her brother, perhaps a fate worse than death, a life that brought a sole soul more hurt than the loss she had felt.
Neither of her parents had come rushing in at the sound of their daughter awakening from another restless sleep filled with horror, for it had been happening for the past two years. Even if it now had been once a week if they were lucky. They had gotten used to the crying, the mumbling, the screams and abrupt awakenings in the dead of night, for they had them all and all three had grown too used to it by now.
The sixteen year old hadn't bothered how ghostly pale she had been upon turning the knob of the door and stepping into the tight space of the hallway that would lead to the living space the Larssen family shared.
Perhaps the memories of her brother haunted her more today, than they had when she was a mere fourteen. Ryle had been sixteen when he was reaped for the 70th annual hunger games, he surely had put up a fight in those first few days and long before the game makers flooded the arena, a mistake that ended up in half of them drowning due to the inability to swim or until they would be swallowed into the endless waters from exhaustion: as she herself felt like drowning along with them, with each night terror.
