Present Day
Peeta
The first thing that hits me when I regain consciousness is the smell. Even if I hadn't spent the past three days, that seemed more like eternity, in a deep sleep consumed with nightmares about the Hunger Games, the smell would have been enough to launch me back alone. It's the smell of enslavement, the smell of total control, the smell of no freedom, the smell of death - the smell of the Capitol.
I can see nothing in this dark dungeon - at least, I assume it is a dungeon. The stone walls that encave me are so cold, the hollowness aches through right to my bones, making me weak and brittle. My eyes are strained from the lack of illumination and my wrists reek of dried blood and ache from the bondage of ropes. I cannot be sure that I'm not back there - that the Rebellion never happened, that I never married Katniss, that Oeno and Kuwai don't exist, that peace really was never restored in our broken nation. It's not until I feel another hollow coldness that I am ironically filled with warmth; the coldness of my wedding band laced around my finger.
Since I regained consciousness I have been sitting here, wishing I had bleach or acid to wash away the images imprinted on the back of my eyelids. The nightmares I had were so vivid, I can almost feel the excrutiating pain in my leg again, almost hear the rain battering on the cave's roof, almost taste the posinous berries on the tip of my tongue; the berries that started it all...
"Peeta Mellark," a voice booms from the never-ending shadows of the corridor outside the bars that cage me in. A white smile is all I can see through the dim light, and a smell more overwhelming than the stench of this dungeon and the arena combined trickles to my nose. It's a scent that spirals fear through me - it can't be.
It's the scent of a white rose.
YOU ARE READING
The Hunger Games: Book Four - How it Might Have Been ... Gale.
FanfictionThe end of the Hunger Games - abrupt, unsatisfying, mysterious? Gale Hawthorne was forgotten after the Rebellion ceased - now he is back to tell his tale. Living alone in District 2, Gale still feels as though something is missing in his life - her...
