"don't you know i'm too young? can't you hear me calling you? nothing hurts me now mum, i'm sorry. all the things i did, just drown it out."
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Valentina
I TOSS AND TURN all night, and it takes hours for me to sleep. When I do sleep, the terrors come back, and I'm left alone in my nightmares again. Tonight, it's different.
As usual, there is a hand reaching out of a frozen lake, my eyes well up with tears as I dip my hand in the freezing water and pull up the hand, only for it to be Amazon staring back at me from my games in the 73rd year. He lunges at me, silently, and I'm shocked at his lack of verbal action.
I grunt at his force and manage to shove him off of me before the water begins rising, and he runs away from me, towards the mountain we had climbed, all three of us.
All three of us? I look around for any sign of Alexander, my district partner, but he is nowhere in sight. I climb the mountain silently, the only sound being that of my steady breaths and grunts of effort. I wonder only how I can do this without him.
I reach the peak of the mountain just as freezing water bites at my ankles, and I have to pull myself over with my palms and elbows, Amazon is already stood at the top of the mountain.
His face changes, distorts, and when I blink he is Alexander. "Why did you let me die?"
I close my eyes and curl up on the mountain, I pinch myself over and over again and I wait to wake up.
Alexander is closer, I can feel his breath on my face. "Why have you replaced me?"
"Why did you let me die?" "Why did you kill me?" "Why didn't you love me?" "Why have you moved on so fast?" "Your family are with me, and they shun you. I hope my family shun you."
His words repeat, and he doesn't stop mocking and asking questions until I cover my ears with my frozen palms and let out a scream. Sobs rack through my body until there are arms wrapped around me, and whispering in my ear, a voice telling me it's okay.
When my eyes open again, I am stable and back in the real world, and Alexander is not there to haunt me, but Finnick is.
I turn to face him but cannot think of anything except what Alexander said, that I'm replacing him. Is that really what I'm doing?
"Hey, what happened?" Finnick was whispering, and I appreciated that he was being sensitive about the topic, but I felt like I was about to burst.
"Nothing. Just a nightmare."
"That wasn't just a nightmare, though."
"It was."
"I thought your nightmares stopped, Val."
The nightmares come and go, and they stay when Finnick leaves, but go when he's here. It's something about the comfort of another that I appreciate heavily since I lost my family.
