ghosts that we knew: A mockingjay fanfiction

Chapter 1

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Chapter 1

Katniss

My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District Twelve. I was in the Hunger Games. I escaped. The Capitol hates me. I was in the Quarter Quell. The arena exploded. I...I...

I don't remember what happens next.

It starts out as a droning hum. As my eyes begin to flutter open, the hum has transformed into a steady beep, evenly spaced and strangely rhythmic. I am now awake, wide eyed and staring into the tile of a white ceiling that I altogether do not recognize but at the same time contains the odd familiarity of tile I have seen many times before. Hospital quarters. The beeps are spread out in intervals of five seconds. They never lull, they never drag. Like intricate clockwork.

Clockwork...

I jolt upward, my head suddenly feeling like the contents of the clock-shaped arena that I managed to explode with my arrow. My muscles are sore, bile burns the edges of my esophagus, and my bones feel brittle, like tiny glass animals captured inside of a glass menagerie.

Like twenty-four tributes, twenty-four past victors, trapped inside of an arena.

The thought finally strikes me that I do not know where I am. Besides the obvious indications that I am being held in some sort of hospital, of course, my exact location is unknown. Am I at home, in District Twelve? I shake my head at the unlikely possibility. Even with the upscale Victor's Village being my new residence, nowhere in District Twelve is a room this sterile and without the familiar sheen of coal dust coating the room's crevices.

Am I under the strict watch of the Capitol? The Capitol wants me dead. It's one of the truest and scariest statements in my introduction that I continually have repeated to myself over the course of the year. If I had miraculously made it out of the arena alive, and the Capitol's hovercraft had been the one to lift me from my crumbling surroundings, why haven't they executed me yet?

The answer is startling, and it injects a shiver into my now convulsing body, powerful enough to shake the very marrow of my bones: they are waiting. They want me alive and well. They want my execution to take place live, in a way that I may experience the pain, the agony, the darkness of death.

My mind is suddenly flooded with the frightened faces of those I can no longer save. Prim hugs her ribcage, body racked with sobs while my stoic mother stares blankly once again into the abyss of death. Gale, his mother Hazelle, his siblings Rory, Vick and little Posy, huddled together in fear. Fear for the lives of their own Hawthorne clan as well as the Everdeen clan I have left behind. Gale's face in particular strikes me. His dark features, his intense stare, and how they nearly disintegrated into his battered, raw body as it lay on my kitchen table the night I chose him. The kiss wasn't enough. And neither was our final argument about running away before the Quell could take hold of me once again. There were words between us that would never be able to be exchanged. Especially after the Quell had been announced. After I had betrayed him.

A long, pinkish scar on my forearm conjures up memories of Johanna Mason, and her knife digging into my flesh, her frantic movements reminding me faintly of Foxface in that moment. Also appearing is chiseled face and body of Finnick Odiar and the focused, wise eyes of Beetee. Had they all survived the explosion? Or were they already sacrificed to the Capitol for their lack of subservience? Worse, I muse, had their involvement with the Capitol been a carefully hidden secret in order to contribute to my eminent demise?

Their loyalty is blurry to me. As blurry as the events of that final evening.

Those who were less fortunate also raid my brain. Madge's twitching body makes me shut my eyes to remove the sting in remembering Finnick's agonized face as he lost his beloved mentor. Wiress' tinny "tick tock" matches the cadence of the machine at my side. Cinna, in all of his simplistic, noble glory, beaten, battered, and bruised right before my eyes just as I entered the arena. The fervent beating inflicted on my stylist by Capitol surely indicates his death, but a glimmer of hope swells in my chest as I hold on to the unknown that he may have pulled through and survived.