The Trackjacker And The Mockingjay (Katniss Everdeen X F.OC)

Reaching A Hand Out.

(I just heard this song for the first time but its mood fits this chapter to a T I feel.)

The ground creaked under her boots.

Long-cooled char crumbling and dry ash powdering.

Rubble had once crackled with fire, groaning with the pain of the inhabitants, and air once was filled with blood vapors, the scent of sizzling flesh, and the smoke of the end.

But now...

12 sat as a carcass picked clean of flesh and viscera. 

Cold destruction, moss already growing on the more nutritious ashes, wind whistling through shattered window frames.

This, this is what she wanted to see for herself? This end?

Ignoring the mutters of solider, stepping over a metal beam, walking deeper into the end of her life.

"So it was true..." Muttering, sorting off that memory, of those images, into a part of her mind she for sure knows to be truth while staring in the eyes of a girl she barely recognize in the shards of a mirror still standing in what was once a little shop.

Reaching out, fingers barely brushing against the shard that it fell out of the frame and fell down, taking the view away.

How is she...Just who the fuck am I dammit?! Why me?! What did I do to deserve this!? They took my mind! My past! My future! What else do they want to take from me?!

Taking a deep breath... Okay breathing exercises don't help true but a deep breath had some merit to it, at least to ground herself by remembering to actually breath.

Looking at the empty mirror frame before walking away, arm dropped again.

A crude copy, that's who she is.

Death... Was not a mystery to Percy, she took lives that was clear to anyone even to herself in her delirium, heh delirium my ass yeah! But the death of herself was not someone was meant to deal with... And yet she lived, a dead girl walking. The Percy all knew, gone, and only she remained, this mismatch of memories and being... She'd never be who they wanted her to be she fears.

Walking to the district center square looking around, imagine flashing, pain remembered, agony relived.

Steps echoing through the freezing silence of the dead corpse of a district, seeming long abandoned and yet festering like a fresh wound. Like a disease, ever present, gnawing at the edges, wanting to take over everything and fill ones senses with only itself.

The burnt wood cracked under her weight but held up, walking up on the stage and standing in the middle, staring in the bowl with shattered edges but mostly intact.

Reaching a hand out, touching the bottom of it, feeling it different, maybe having melted as she heard it was firebombs that had been dropped.

Lifting her eyes slowly, staring ahead.

One day I stood here with that mutt didn't I, so fucking annoying... Haymitch should have come into the arena with me. He was aware of the plan they failed to mention to us... The mutt could have been evacuated during the games and then we would have gotten out.

Looking away from the phantoms of her past and looking ahead.

Crouching on the ledge and just staring out at the ground further away, ignoring whatever solider or Haymitch himself was trailing her.

Would this all have been avoided if that day Prim had grabbed her hand?

Reaching a hand out at the ghostly memories, one she didn't need confirmation to know it was the truth, that little girl couldn't hurt a fly.

Sighing, hopping of the stage.

The victors' village stood like the clue, like the knife that killed the old rich man, proud and protruding from the decay around it.

The cast iron pot in the lawn long filled with dirty water with leaves floating around in it.

Steps leading up to a porch and that porch lead to a front door, through that front door was a foyer.

Percy's steps kicked up dust, this... This looked deader then the rest of the district.

Barely registering Haymitch telling the soldier to leave her alone as she moved in.

So dead, this looked so dead...

Not like someone came and killed but is the people here had just up and vanished... Well I guess I can say thanks to that fucker Gale this once, not that he'll hear it anyway, I'll kill him first... But truly... Him and those candidates that chose to remain, to die and help their kin... Without them there would be no district 12 remaining.

She walked around the living room, the couch still left like that morning when she kicked the blanket half off it in the early morning, awoken by screams once again.

Fingers twitched when she touched the dust fabric. Had me and the mutt been that close? How dare she touch me?... And why did she wake up for her?

She felt like her heart wanted to feel something, something she couldn't tell, like it was locked up and chained down with the inability to scream that it is here or to beg her to feel it again.

Taking her hand away, tracing her fingers long the sheathed blades she left upon the table that day.

I suppose you are not the only monster now Hades, I am a worse fuck then you in the eyes of many, it is pissing me off...

Sighing, looking up at the mantle over the fireplace, reaching a hand out to grab a picture frame, mutt and her family... I fucking hate this... But she must have stuck around for a reason, Percy was not that illogical right?

Putting it back down, legs carrying her up the stairs.

Touching the cold surface of that bed, had she really agreed to share a bed, what the fuck is going on?! I am so confused. She had a hard time wrapping her head around it.

That feeling again... It filled her with longing to understand it but it was like it was deleted and only the empty void it was meant to fill remained.

There was an emotion there, others they murderous intent, other then instinctual fear for survival, there was a feeling buried and forgotten under agony and pain. A feeling that yearned and fought to show itself to Percy but it was just too far.

No matter how much she reached a hand out, no matter how far she stretched that arm out, this drowning feeling could not reach, could not hope for rescue from the sludgy depths of her mind.

A feeling that would answer all her questions and yet remained elusive to all and itself.

Percy needs answers... A way to reach it... For it was the last piece of the puzzle as too why she felt like her instincts to off the girl were incorrect.

And so, looking at that lonely bed, ears filled with unheard echoes of a moment she didn't remember, was when she decided.

Tho lacking answers, first she'd kill Snow and is the mutt is still a danger, she'll kill her after but Snow is the greater evil.

And who knows.

Maybe he holds the keys to what she wishes for.

To remember that emotion that would fix everything.

And make everything alright.

Even if it seemed a hand length away.

With a color of shimmering green.