The Hunger Games: Never Safe From Danger

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

Alsa’s POV

Nothing changes anymore. My family are stuck in a cycle of neverending gloomy days.

We’ve seen nothing of Torr since the parade. They dressed him as a thunderbolt. He didn’t seem too happy about that.

I can’t wait for the Games to start. Maybe that makes me a horrible person. Maybe it’s sad that I’m wishing the period of time when my brother is safe away. But I don’t care. I would give anything to just see his face again, to just hear his voice.

And the only way that will happen now, apart from the too-short-to-enjoy interviews, is if he gets stalked by the cameras in the Games. So the sooner they start, the sooner I’ll see him. The sooner I see him, the sooner he dies. The sooner he dies, the sooner I die inside. I can’t win.

I never thought that anything could rip people apart like this. I’ve had family and friends die before. But Torr’s closer. Even then, I really underestimated the impact his absence would have on our lives.

He used to watch Rosaliss and I before our parents were back from work. He used to make us dinner, and tell us jokes, and keep our spirits up with little jokes. Now we face every cold, empty day alone, letting no rays of sunshine in. Refusing to talk to those who love us, those who are concerned about us, those who care. Because nothing really matters to us anymore.

My daily routine is to live through everything. Just try and survive everything. I get up, and on a good day I will be emotionally stable enough to go to school, so I will and the concern of the other kids will tear my wall of stableness down. I will go home and just melt onto the bed and cry.

If I am not well enough to go to school, I sit alone in bed for hours, staring at the wood on the walls. Left alone with my thoughts, my worries. Sometimes making myself physically sick with fear.

What makes it twice as painful is watching Rosaliss go through the same stuff. She has a basic understanding of what’s happening now, and she often joins me in emotional breakdowns. She is only seven. This happens to seven-year-olds. She’s not the first. There will have been thousands of tributes with a tiny little sister or brother who misses them, and whose life is torn apart when they die…

Torr might die. I can’t comprehend it. I can’t imagine what life will possibly become if the worst does happen. My brain is programmed to take him for granted. If there was no hope of him ever coming back, I would be destroyed, even more so than I am now.

So I hope. That is my lifeline. It is what I cling to in my time of need- the tiny chance that he will come out victorious. He’d better. He has to. There is no world without him. There is no life.