𝐒𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐊𝐒 ❦ The Hunger Games

fourteen

☆ CHAPTER FOURTEEN! ☆
014. the burning man

|| JUNGLE ||
❝won't you follow
me into the jungle?
Ain't no god on my
streets in the heart
of the jungle.❞

➳➳

THE FIVE OF us walked around the dome for hours.

So long that the sun had finally left the centre of the sky and the canopy that I had marvelled at became mundane with each passing step- it was as if I had grown tired to the greenery in minutes. After so long, even my earliest wish of owning my own forest went sour because of the time I spent amongst the trees. Even if these trees weren't real, I was already convinced that I had seen enough.

It was all the same.

With every turn we faced the same green leaves and muddy floor that reminded me of my sister's eyes, or the hair that fell in minuscule feathers from the ponytail I had kept it in. The same rocks, the same trees so that we never truly realised where we were going or where we had been- Peeta could of been leading us in one large circle and none of us would of been able to tell.

Nobody but the viewers that were laughing along, or my sister who would be watching through her small boney fingers.

But I couldn't imagine it. Even with the torment that had passed across my view in the hours we had been walking, not one was based around my sister. It was as if I had banished her from them, or that I simply didn't have enough memories of her speaking or just being with me to manipulate into another nightmare. I had cut her out so drastically that I couldn't even imagine her smile as she saw me on a screen, or the tears that she would spill when she saw a weapon impale itself through my heart.

No, it wasn't possible. And yet I could imagine the same tears and smiles on Finnick whenever I caught his face in the leaves.

I didn't know if I could even call him my friend anymore. I wanted him to be, somewhat desperately, but there was a part of me that was so sure that the distance was a good thing in the end. Like a subtle warning for what was to come, or a hint to those that knew me best that the isolation was out of mercy instead of need- or that I had finally lost the last tether to normality I had. I had convinced myself that it was a good thing, even if my imagination didn't quite get the message through each foliage of sharpened greenery.

It still threw him into each memory I saw; every one that didn't take me back to the desert that haunted me.

Like how the last branch that Peeta slash with his only machete reminded me of a severed arm that'd been bled dry; his machete blunted almost as quickly as his vision did as he wasted its long sharp edge on inanimate branches. Not that anyone would tell him otherwise. It seemed that the group had found some kind of unspoken harmony as we all trekked through the jungle with sweat dripping down our backs, something that was only strengthened by the ghosts that kept me company in the heat.