Chapter Text
She didn’t have any time to breathe.
That’s what she’d think about later, looking back on how it happened.
Everything had been so hectic. The mission, the press tours, the debriefings, the physicals. Everyone wanted a piece of them, a piece of her.
It was in Canada that she first noticed it. The way things started to feel ever so slightly unreal around the edges.
Then she was alone in the hotel, doom-scrolling, when she found a video of her crew, of her, being confronted by a man calling them actor-nauts. She let it replay over and over. Stared at her own fixed smile, at the handlers gently ushering them away.
“I don’t remember that.” She couldn’t place it at all. She scrolled through the comments, trying to find when it had happened, where. She remembered being at the Capitol. But she couldn’t remember this.
Christina looks dissociated
The comment leapt out at her from the screen. Was that why she couldn’t remember it? But she doesn’t dissociate, not normally. Not her.
She put the thought out of her mind. It’s just stress, she told herself. Stress and exhaustion. Nothing more. There isn’t time for it to be anything more.
Tomorrow she’s going to the lake house with Jeremy and Catherine. Tomorrow she’ll rest, and everything will be fine, she’s certain of it.
But she’s wrong.