Chapter Text
There are whole minutes where the world is quiet, where the loop of colors and sounds run together and blur senselessly. The respite is brief, but in those minutes, few and far between, Katniss knows sixty seconds of peace. After that, there is only the maddening procession of memory.
Some days the sound of Prim's laughter haunts her through the dimly lit hallways, a season or another filtered through dust motes and stale, still air. She thinks that she could bottle it up, it's so thick in the house that once was a home. These days aren't so bad; there are worse things to hear than the good cheer of ghosts: your friends reduced to torn limbs and so much red, the ashen, smoldering wreck that was once a town and now cannot even call itself a graveyard. Your sister as kindling, alight. Yes, there are worse things.
If there were a switch, perhaps, one in her head that she could reach down her mouth and flick off with a finger. Perhaps, then, she could figure out a way to position her arms, her legs, into a semblance of living. But there is no switch. There are nightmares while she's asleep, then again while she is awake. These waking nightmares projected out from behind her eyes that are the same scenes again and again. If she didn't feel crazy then, a caged bird singing, then she thinks she must be now.
There are whole days when she doesn't feel corporeal, drifting in an out of rooms, forgetting that human bodies need food to live. She doesn't feel weak, she doesn't feel hunger. She doesn't feel anything at all, the mute numbness bone deep, beyond the bones, even. On the atomic scale, there is a hollowness, a stillness. She can't hear her heart beating in its cage—is she, too a ghost? Is this how ghosts live? Parading through life, incorporeal shells of their former selves, following the same, maddening paces. She wanders the rooms, sits in chairs. Her voice forgets how to speak, her hands forget how told hold. When Buttercup appears, the shock is so bright, so sudden, that she blinks back the white that floods her vision, hearing the echos of her own screams, spit and fury drenching the corners of her cracked lips.
Why this? Why me? She has never heard of survivor's guilt, wouldn't know how to live under the umbrella of such a diagnosis. She heard once that time heals all wounds. Can a thing be healed if it is only buried under days and weeks and unwashed skin and the dead quiet of an empty house? Time heals nothing. Time is indifferent. Time carries on, but Katniss doesn't.