Chapter Text
Katniss woke up to her own screams again. It was part of her routine at that point, something she had grown accustomed to. Images of the horrors lived in the past three years haunted her dreams every night. She would hear her sister’s screams when she volunteered, see the kids she murdered in the arena, Rue, the mutts with their eyes, Cato’s long death, Peeta’s lifeless form when his heart stopped, feel the pain from that poisonous fog, and her sister. She saw her sister die every night.
Katniss was exhausted, she had gone through more things in three years than any person did in their whole lifes.
Well, there was Peeta, of course. If there was something they had in common, it was the terrible things they had gone through together and the people they had lost.
They still weren’t the same as before his hijacking, and she suspected they were never going to be the same. The old Peeta was dead, he had died somewhere in the Capitol while she was safe in 13. She had grieven him and had now finally accepted that reality. He would never come back entirely. He would get better though, not entirely well, but better. At least that’s what doctor Aurelius said.
But until then, he still struggled a lot. He would always flinch at the smallest things, appear with cuts in his arms and lock himself in his house for days with no contact with the exterior world to come back days later pretending as if nothing had happened.
She had confronted him about that, but she couldn’t blame him, she had done the same her first weeks back in 12. She understood him, and she knew Haymitch did too. They were a group of heavily traumatised child murderers that had lost their family and their sanity.
She knew the other two could hear her screams from their own houses, Peeta had come to her rescue a few times and Haymitch had been so kind to comment with a high dose of sarcasm how he loved being woken up like that.
She wished Peeta would scream too, at least that way she would know when he was having a nightmare. She would love to be able to help him, but he didn’t make a sound.
It was curious, Johanna had said that she could hear Peeta scream for hours when they were prisoners of Snow. What kinds of horrors could they have made him go through to make him scream like that? She didn’t know if she wanted to know, but she hoped that one day he would heal enough to talk about it.
Slowly, Katniss pulled off the sweaty sheets she was covered with, deciding she couldn’t go back to sleep, so she put on her slippers before heading to the bathroom. A cold shower would make her feel better, it grounded her, got her back to reality, made her remember that neither she or anyone she loved were in danger any longer. There was no way she could shower with hot water anyways, it made her burns hurt.
She looked at herself in the mirror, something she didn’t do very often. If she didn’t know for sure that that was her reflection, she wouldn’t recognize herself. She was thinner than usual, paler, and with dark bags under her eyes. A map of ugly burn scars covered her entire body and she now wore her hair short. She looked hideous.
Greasy Sae had cut her hair off a few days after she came back. It had been very damaged from the fire of the explosion and there was nothing to be done to repair it other than cutting it off to make it grow back healthier. And, besides, the old woman had told her that hair holds memories, if she wanted to heal, she had to let go.
She hadn't wanted to heal and she hadn't wanted to let go. Memories were the only thing she had left of her sister. But Sae was even more stubborn than Katniss, if that was even possible. So, at the end, she cut Katniss’ hair shorter than the girl would have liked.
She stepped outside the shower with the intention of going back to bed, not knowing what else to do –It was four in the morning, it wasn’t like she could go outside–, when she saw from her bedroom’s window that the light of Peeta’s room was on. She wondered then if her screams had woken him up or if he had had his own nightmare. She wished she could just go there and reassure him, just as he had done a few times. But she couldn’t bring herself to do that. What if he was having a flashback? It could be dangerous but for herself and for him if he saw her and thought her to be a mutt.
Katniss wanted to help him, she really wanted. But she knew all the suffering he had gone through had been her fault, even if he said it was Snow’s. Peeta would do better without her.
He was so close and yet so far away.
At least she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep.