Depressed: A Hunger Games Story

Chapter 4: Katniss's Perspective

Katniss couldn't hear anything, couldn't see much either. Her sight was clouded over and her throat felt severely damaged and burned, but she didn't care. Her brain seemed to have been replaced with something that made her head swim and feel light at the same time, and all she could hear was a faint humming and the occasional strange sound... something like a cat? Kitty cat. She liked kitty cats. Katniss still just about had control of her arm, and used it to tip the dregs of the bottle down her throat, though she must have missed because she felt it trickle down her chin.

The liquor did exactly what she hoped it would and quietened the voices in her mind to an extent where they were hardly there. It took Katniss a while to locate the humming noise – eventually her slowed brain realised it was a sound like human speech. Katniss turned her head around, left and right, then up, straight ahead. She wasn't alone... blinking rapidly, she tried to identify the person in front of her. Effie... no, it wasn't Effie. She shook her head, trying to decipher the sounds as words, and trying to make out who was in front of her. The part that connected her senses to her brain seemed to have shut down.

With her mind this clouded, Katniss couldn't keep her focus for very long, and soon forgot about the other person. The humming sound was suddenly much louder, but Katniss absently started tapping the table, totally dead to the world.

And then she made out the word Peeta.

Suddenly she could decipher the words. Still she had trouble recognising who was talking to her, but Katniss knew that name, and even in this state, she remembered how little she wanted to see Peeta. So drunk she couldn't do much else, she gaped up at the person talking to her and tried to listen to what they were saying.

Something like, "...that would get your attention... look awful... OK, Katniss?"

It took Katniss a long time to realise she was meant to respond to that. But her speech didn't appear to be working, so she just managed a non-committal sound, not that she even knew what the question was. She'd already forgotten.

"...not well enough to go," she caught the person say. "...even know... saying? Guess that's... no."

Katniss was getting bored of this conversation now, so she fumbled around the stuff on the table for another drink. She found her arrow instead, and started to play around with it in her fingers. The amount of time she was playing around with it was indefinite, but then there was a loud bang as someone slammed something on the table in front of her. It was enough to divert her attention to the other person in the room, but they left as she looked up.

Katniss's drunken mind was intrigued, so she leant over to try work out what they'd put there, but she was so dizzy and tired from the lack of sleep she fell face first onto the wooden table. She didn't make any attempt to get up, even when something strange and alive and fluffy brushed past her cheek. She couldn't for the life of her think of what that could be, but she didn't care, and let her eyelids droop until they were nearly closed, the drowsiness finally taking over from the last few sleepless nights...

Katniss sat bolt upright. She couldn't fall asleep! She couldn't-

Wait, where was she? She looked around at her surroundings. Everything had crystal clarity now, but she was no longer in... wherever she had just been. All around her was darkness, around the walls, where the ceiling should be, and the floor she was kneeling on. She noted that she was much more alert now, but couldn't remember where she'd just been, and she certainly didn't recognise where she was now.

Katniss squinted in the dark, attempting to make out something in the dark, but that was all it was – darkness. There was nothing to make out.