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The winter cold was creeping in from every crack in the wooden shack Grian lived in. He couldn’t manage to get enough coal to keep warm that night, and he’d been shaking and rattling with the wind.
He was already wearing as many layers as he could manage to fit on. More than tree jumpers and he wouldn’t be able to move at all.
So he sat there, crouched on his makeshift bed, nested within all his blankets, shaking.
He tried to think how he had managed all the years prior, it wasn’t the coldest winter District 12 had seen by a long shot, but he’d never been so cold that he couldn’t sleep, and the moment he realised, half a sob made its way up to his throat.
He used to share the bed with his sister, warming each other up with their own body heat, and now that Pearl wasn’t there, he just couldn’t warm up.
He tried to keep the tears under control but it came crashing down on him, how much he had missed her.
Grian’s eyes fell on the side of the drawer that had Pearl’s stuff still there, the one he hadn’t touched since the previous summer.
He got up and the cold hit him, as he made his way across the tiny room, where he opened Pearl’s bottom drawer, and right where it had been left when last year’s spring had come in, was her cloak, bright red and incredibly soft, a real beautiful piece of clothing that his sister had once adored.
He pulled it out and put it around his shoulders, and it still smelled like her, so he crawled back into his nest of blankets, and now finally warm enough he cried himself to sleep.
The house had absolutely no reason to be that warm. The houses in the Victor’s Village had amenities that the rest of the district could only dream of, and one of those was a fully functional heating system that Pearl could not figure out how to turn off.
So she had been turning and tossing, unable to even try to rest, since sleep usually evaded her anyways. Until she just gave up, got up and opened the window to let the cold in, if she was gonna get sick from the temperature difference so be it.
As she looked out at the moon, her mind wandered, remembering where she’d been a year before, when her life hadn’t been changed forever.
She thought about how she used to share a bed with his brother on colder nights, and the guilt came rising, because surely tonight he’d be freezing while she wouldn’t even speak to him.
Pearl missed him so much, but showing they were close was too dangerous, she couldn’t risk making him a target.
So she kept her distance, kept him, and everyone else as far away as she could.
But she was allowed to miss him. In the privacy of the night, with only the moon as her witness. So she cried angry, guilty sobs, until her throat was raw and her whole body shaking.
She went to her closet, a massive thing that had way more space than she needed, and from an almost empty shelf she took out one of Grian’s shirts, that she had taken from their old home a while back when the house had been empty and she was trying to get some of her stuff.
It comforted her, so when she lay back down, finally she could calm down and rest a bit.