𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐒 ❦ The Hunger Games Sequel

sixteen

☆ CHAPTER  FORTY ONE ! ☆
041. a long sleep

|| SHUTTER ISLAND ||
❝Goodness Gracious,
I'm replaceable,
you say that I'm
too crazy, I guess
you were right. ❞

➳➳

PEETA LOOKED LIKE he hadn't eaten in months.

Had it been months? Had time slipped between the cracks of my hands so fast that I’d failed to noticed the months that would age me and those that I held closest? Had the days counted into weeks, which went by without giving the boy whose screams were once the harshest thing I could imagine a visitor? Were his eyes, that I’d been told now glisten with a layer of depravity, not the same entangled blue eyes that’d once stared in at me from a distance in the hopes of once again being able to give me a comforting hand? His hair was now brown, but was it time that had forced out the blonde that reminded me of cornsilk despite the coarse texture?

Surely it couldn’t have been a month.

I knew there were gaps; some large enough to leave me grasping for one minute out of an entire year so I could emerge from beneath a wall of grey smoke. Before Katniss, and the heat, it was hard to put faces and details together in any real order that didn’t seem wildly out of place. Even now, I questioned whether I would be able to push this girl away from harm, or if my arms were too weak. But when I looked at the boy- the baker who was a stone compared to my polished glass- it was hard to imagine somebody like him being friends with a person who could barely take care of her own needs.

But it was all so confusing. It could've been a month; if I had my life to put on it, I would do so in the hopes of finally coming to a definitive answer. I would bet my life on almost any assumption I’ve made just to finally know something was real.
I hoped the skeleton of the boy I remembered could tell me.

Gently, I shook the boy awake until his eyes sprung open and he snatched a deep breath from the surrounding air. For a second it looked like he’d forgotten where he was. You could almost see the switch, when his legs curled into himself and his neck lulled back so the crown of his head was rustling against one of the chipped concrete walls. It took a moment for his eyes to open again, but when they did, the depravity I’d been warned about took it’s form as a rush of energy and exhaustion.

"Lorna?" Peeta whispers struggled to claw into my ears.

"Peeta, what have they do to you.”

I’d failed to consider that once I’d met somebody who knew me, I’d feel like I’d forgotten more than I felt in the confines of my room. I thought I remembered him, and the way it would feel to cup his cheek and watch the blood rush to the tip of his nose and below his eyes, but even that had been outdated. His cheekbone was so utterly prominent that I could feel it against my palm as I tried to give him some of my life, some of the energy that I had stolen from him in the time I’d forgotten he was like this- the month that I had spent only thinking about myself.