kill for your love - the hunger games

(041) but her hand did slip

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KILL FOR YOUR LOVE.

act three.

(chapter forty-one, but her hand did slip)

a white room, 75 ADD.

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THE VICTOR DID NOT sleep that night. She didn't want to. She couldn't close her eyes. She had suddenly felt frightened by the bed and quilts. Juniper still saw the dip in the sheets from when Clampitt had sat on them previously and whatever it was, she was terrified of them. Juniper felt as if the blankets would suffocate her with their soft touch. And so, for most of that night, she sat cross-legged on the cold, tiled floor. 

And as she did, feeling the coolness creep into her being, there was one thing that was certain on her mind. Finnick. Finnick enveloped her thoughts, took ahold of her brain. She remembered the clip Clampitt had shown her of the last night of the Quell and the man from Four seemed dangerously close to the lightning tree. Did he get electrocuted? Was he paralysed? Was he even alive?

No. He was. Clampitt had said that the rebels picked him and everyone else up. So Finnick had to be alive. But what was he doing? Was he pacing around whatever rebel headquarters, biting his fingernails and the skin surrounding his thumbs as he thought of ways he could persuade Plutarch to save Juniper? Was Annie with him? 

Annie was surely with Finnick. That was something the man would ask Plutarch, Lucy, and Haymitch to do first thing he woke. He would want them to get Annie from Four before it was too late. He had already lost Mags, his mentor. He couldn't lose Annie, the woman he loved to his core, as well. But could he lose Juniper? 

That was something Juniper thought about as she shuddered on the floor. Could everyone live on without her? Juniper gathered that they could. Two weeks, five days now. Everyone could go on without her. Orion Hale, her father, might not. He would be devastated. Lucy Stevens would be dismayed. She might shed a tear. Juniper hoped she would shed more than a tear. And then Finnick. He, if it weren't for Annie presumably being with him, wouldn't live on. Juniper and the man had gotten close over the three-years that they had known each other. Inseparable within the Capitol, which was really the only time they saw each other. So, Juniper, in her selfish, petty way, would like to think that Finnick was stricken with fear over her. He seemed to be the only plausible rebel to be so. 

But the thought of Finnick Odair caring for her did not help Juniper with her fear of the quilts. She had no idea what was going on with her, but all she could think about was Clampitt's eyes staring into her, her silk voice flowing through the air as she said that Juniper owed the Capitol something. 

She didn't owe the Capitol anything. She had made that quite clear to the doctor. The Capitol had taken everything she had ever loved. Just because they saved her from the arena when Plutarch left her there didn't mean anything. They probably took her with the idea of torturing her for the plan. But it had been two weeks, five days and yet, there was no torture. There was no abuse. The only people Juniper ever saw within the white room of hell was Clampitt and the occasional Peacekeeper that rolled in the television and gave her meals. 

Juniper was just going crazy by her own accord. 

She had been sitting on the floor for hours by the time she forced herself to get up. Her joints throbbed, muscles cramped, bones moaned. There was a certain amount of tension in her lower back that no cracking of her spine could get. She had forced herself to sit cross-legged on the tiles and that was the consequence she would get. Even the loud banging of the door opening caused every fibre in her being to tingle.