ghosts that we knew: A mockingjay fanfiction

29

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Chapter 29

Johanna

The first thing I notice is light.

Impossible, infinitesimal amounts of light. Light in flashing, blinding shades of amber and yellow. Light illuminates the corridor, exploding the world of perpetual darkness around me.

I am jostled awake from my fitful slumber by this light, immediately clawing at my head to rip out hair that is no longer there. Screams tear my lungs in half as thoughts of sparks and volts searing, splicing through my blood and bones, raid my Washroom-related nightmares once again.

But I am nowhere near the Washroom. I am crouched in my cold, cramped cell. The light doesn't come from the flickering levers beside a hospital bed or the simmering synapses of my brain, but from the ceiling.

Like a moth drawn to a flame, I drag myself up from the corner of the cell, stagger a few forced feet, and collapse back into a heap just before my skeletal fingers can reach the bars on my door.

My hope mounts with each flash of light and every siren heard in the distance. A few cells down the hall, Annie's manic cries fill the air. They are almost immediately drowned out by the blaring alarms that fill our cellblock with urgency.

This is it. I know that this is it. I can feel it in my bones. The moment that has kept me from hurling myself over the edge and into perpetual darkness after many long, painful months has finally arrived.

Never once do I take my eyes off of the light, even as my thoughts fly about and struggle to land in one place due to the utter chaos of things. No matter how inside out I feel, dizzy and delirious, I force myself to stay alert enough to just focus on the light.

Because if I so much as blink, it could all go away, becoming a fleeting figment of my deranged imagination that never even existed to begin with.

If the light goes away, then darkness returns. As does the eminence of my death.

The suctioning sound of the door, followed by the subsequent sound of heavy boots pounding against the cold floor, causes my heart to leap into my chest.

This is it. Dammit, this better be it.

Adorned from head to toe in shiny black armor, a tall brute of a man rushes into my spinning field of vision. With shaggy dark hair and alarmingly gray eyes that highlight the boyish features that have just fully matured, my intruder seems to be no more than eighteen years old. Dread shadows itself beneath his militant, determined countenance and immediately tells me that he is out of place from the usual visitors in my room.

For starters, he's not wearing his usual Peacekeeper white. I feel relief-relief, there's a feeling that hasn't been around for a long while-when I note that my guest doesn't bear the usual sniveling grin and pail of icy water to pour over my head, either.

He works with quick, quiet diligence, unlatching the locks on my door and swinging the bars out of his way. There's no way this boy, this man, works for the Capitol. As he gingerly places his clammy hands beneath my armpits and gathers all that's left of me into his arms, while sirens scream out into the night and the flashing lights continue to haze my view, I piece the conclusion together that I have just been slung over the shoulder by a rebel.

He performs a quick once-over upon taking me in his arms, running fingers over the coarse, shaved spikes of patchy hair left on my head, lifting my chin to find an identity in my sunken-in facial features, and carefully eyeing up the shapes and sizes of the abrasions covering every exposed inch of skin on my body, before he turns over his shoulder to a comrade.