Primrose Everdeen, Keep Running [The Hunger Games]

Thursday 24th December 2015

   The drink was a sea in a bottle. Angry waves, tossing the content around in swirls, all the while being perfectly calm. It was a sky in a glass and a clear dream in a reality ringed to hopeless.

   Just a bottle. Just a drink. 

   Colourless crystal, yet perfect blue. No labels, yet I knew exactly what it did.

   I would never have left her. Never. But then, why am I here now? It was all surreal - a dream-stated living. It wasn't my decision. It couldn't have been. I would never leave her. I shouldn't have been there and they should have. Now, I shouldn't be here but I am, and so are they. And so they are.

   They'll come for me like they took Peeta. And it will break Mother, like it did Katniss. I can't do anything, that's the frustrating thing. The drink just brought me and my old bag, hung across my shoulder. 

   I am alone. 

   Alone in a forest. In a forest covered in snow. In a year that forests existed.

   This, though, was new. It was old and well loved and worn and dark and scary and a playground for the dead and a playground for the living. Just a forest, but it was a new sight to me. I grew up in black and white, or more accurately: black and grey. I didn't know when I was little, but everyone around me was sad. However much they smiled, they were still sad- it didn't change anything. There were those who had stopped smiling, because they had  worked out it didn't change anything and stopped bothering. Though Mother said they had just stopped caring. 

   So I walked. Just like I would walk the streets of District 12 with a smile that pretended our lives were all okay. I slid on the snow with my scarf wrapped around my neck and bunches up in my hands as if I were at home. I trudged along as if there weren't people wanting me dead for walking into an abandoned room this morning. And picking up a bottle. And drinking it, and leaving her. 

   Each step cracked a twig or crunched the snow and broke the silence. I couldn't get away from the loud and the nothing. I got quicker and quicker until it was a run. Flat-out with the cool wind pulling past my face, grabbing my instincts. Simply moving. But I wasn't running from them. I wasn't scared of them. I should have had fear coursing through every bone and fiber in my being knowing they were nearby, but I wasn't scared of them. I didn't care.

   That's what scared me.

   My own thoughts.

   That's what I ran from. The shouting and the silence. The screaming nothingness.

   Mother, I'm sorry.

   I ran until it was therapy for my discomfort. I was the storm of the sea in a bottle. I was the expanse of the sky in a glass forest, where each snowflake would shatter at your touch.

   Each fleck of snow grasping at a branch enhanced. Every oddly tight cuff of my dress became painfully apparent. Clarity graced every sense and comfort whispered it's goodbyes once more.

   They say we bottle things up, but the phial was meant to be my vent. Now I can't hit anything as hard as I want to more than ever. Frustration tightened my body and sent me walking again- no better off here than I was back home.

   Untangling me from my thoughts was a yell. "Don't take him away!"

   "Who?" I asked, genuinely curious.

    The voice yelped and jumped back. "I..." As the voice trailed off I identified it to be that of the tiny figure, curled into a ball, tucked behind an oak tree. Dead leaves covered the ground around her and this seemed to be a fitting landscape for the tear stained cheeks and bleeding left arm.