After The Storm (A Hunger Games Fanfic)

The Careers and the Tree - 11

Ever dances through the grass, and the grass dances with her. It pulls at her hands, wanting her to stay, but she can't so she smiles at it and moves on. The sun spins around her. There's no music but it doesn't matter; she can make it up. She doesn't know that many songs, only the short ones the mockingjays sing and they don't have any words. She can't whistle like a mockingjay, although she would like to. She tried once, up in a tree like the man in white had told her, the one with the eye on the front and back of his uniform. She wondered if he could see out of both. She tried to purse her lips like blowing a kiss to the sky, and she breathed out through them, and nothing happened. She tried again, blowing harder, and her cheeks puffed out and it didn't matter any more that she couldn't whistle, because it was so funny when her cheeks puffed out like that. She did it for the rest of the day.

"Grass, grass, grass," she chirps to herself, her own music for her to dance to, "Lots and lots of grass!" She laughs in between verses, giggles bursting like little rainbow bubbles from her mouth. Her shovel hangs on her back, tied in a sling rope made of plaits of grass. Grass! Grass everywhere. Nothing but grass and sky and grass and sky and...

That's not grass.

It looks like a big flaky hand sticking out of the ground, clawing for the surface. Like a skeleton. Like somebody has been buried in the ground and is trying to get out. Only a very big person, and a very very thin one. Dark, like all the people back home.

She laughs loudly to herself. It's not a person's hand. It's a tree. Like back at home. Only this one is lonely. She should give it a hug.

"Bye bye, grass!" she says to the nearest blade, "It was fun playing with you!"

The grass waves goodbye in return, whispering for her to come back soon. The tree looks blank as she approaches and throws her thin little arms around the rough bark. It crumbles. The tree is sad. It needs more looking after. The trees at home were better looked after than this.

Her fingers itch to climb. Her feet ache to be off the floor. They've been on the floor too long and they want space under them.

"It's okay, tree!" she says, "I won't hurt you!" And she clambers nimbly into the branches, hopping from one to the other, watching the grass become small. She is above everything now. She can see tracks in the grass, though none where she was because the grass likes her and wants to hide her. They keep stopping and they look like cracks in the ground, only the ground is green and gold and sways like how she thinks the sea must look. It's like she could dive into it if she wanted.

One of them is where the frowny girl strangled the big man. There is a hole in one of them where the pretty girl fell.

There are blue tracks, water. The sun, already into the afternoon, is hot up here. If she squints she can see it shining off something gold, the big gold tail sticking out of the ground, where the big man jabbed Nocturne right through the middle.

She stops herself thinking of that. It wasn't nice. It made her all wobbly inside, all scared. But up here she doesn't have to be scared. She's like a squirrel. Nobody can hurt her and the big man is dead. And she has her shovel. 

She grabs it off her back and holds it close, just in case somebody has disguised themselves with the tree.

And then she realizes that somebody is nearby. No, not just somebody. Several somebodies.

"Up there!" Boo announces coolly.

"Huh?" Trey, an axe rather than the sword dangling from his hand - not like it makes a difference - snaps back into the real world, and follows where Boo is pointing. It's hard to tell, but it seems like the grass is getting thinner, and there's a tree perched in the middle of a kind of clearing. A small figure is hunched in it, looking the other way. His stomach plummets. But then...what would his father say?