As the Driven Snow

Created pm 11/25/13, 5:00PM

The knees of her pants slowly freezing solid, Katniss struggled to keep her breathing even as she failed again and again to complete what should have been a simple task.

She knew it wasn't real, she knew it wasn't.

She knew that what was now turning into a ten-minute labor would have taken less than thirty seconds if only she'd actually used her hands to scoop the snow into the bowl, instead of futilely attempting to chip away at the ice-hard ground with the edge of it.

Her brain—torn between a sluggish confusion that numbed her senses, and a manic anxiety that had her pacing her time through the huge house that was supposedly hers—struggled to fit what she was seeing with what she knew had to be real.

But...as hard as she tried, she couldn't bring herself to touch the snow.

Even with bits of shockingly green grass poking through here and there—genetically modified, no doubt—it was just so... white.

So pure.

She didn't dare to mar it with the blood that covered her hands.

She knew it wasn't real, she knew that she was just imagining it, Haymitch had talked to her about these sorts of things, warned her, but she could feel it, warm, and heavy, and wrong against her skin, dripping and sliding down her arms from her elbows and into the bowl, tainting the purity of the snow she'd already gathered, the red slowly bleeding into the white in a way that sickened her until her entire body was shaking.

Gale was inside the house that didn't belong to her, hurt and bleeding because of her, and there was nothing she could do to help. Staring down at her crimson stained hands, she struggled to hold back tears.

Ever since the games, she'd been different.

Blood—of those she'd killed, and those who she'd watched die— had stained her soul and soaked into her mind like it was a sponge starved for water. For years, she'd been filled with anger. Rage against her mother, who refused to acknowledge her daughters' existence, rage against the peacekeepers, who confiscated half the animals she killed as payment for her secret, while they watched the town they were supposed to protect starve, and rage against the government that had allowed all of this to happen.

She'd wanted to fight, deep down. She'd wanted to shout and scream and raise her bow against something other than wild animals with barely enough meat on them to keep her family alive.

Only now, after everything that had happened, after everything she'd done, she'd finally been given the chance to fight, only to realize the moment it had been handed to her that she'd never actually wanted it to begin with.

If her mind was a sponge, then the Hunger Games had soaked it with blood, then wrung it until it was dry and she had nothing left to do but stare at the mess they had left behind.

The door to...she couldn't really remember whose house, they all looked the same, and none of them were hers, not really, opened, and a spike of icy-cold fear stabbed into her chest as she realized that she was just sitting there, out in the open, completely exposed to any attack that could come her way.

The shivers that had nothing to do with the cold remained even after she realized that it was just Prim, and she couldn't get them to stop. The sky suddenly seemed too far away, the short distance between the two houses she crouched in the middle of might have well have been miles long for all the comfort they brought her.

Usually the hulking shadows they cast helped reassure her. They were built to last, and would probably still be there when she was dead and gone.

But now...

"Ever since the games, something's been different." Prim said softly, shocking her back into reality to realize that she'd completely lost track of the conversation they'd been having, "I can see it."

For a moment, it felt like the icicle of fear that had stabbed her before had turned into a knife, plunging deeper and twisting until horror filled her, and she stared down at her hands, at the blood that caked her skin, the stench of it metallic and strong in the air, and felt the breath leave her lungs.

She'd tried hard to protect her sister from what had happened to her. But it was pointless. There was no masking the screams or terrified gasps that escaped her as the struggled to distinguish dream from waking, memory from the moment, and imagination from reality. She couldn't hide the way she avoided the fireplaces when they were lit, and flinched when they went out and she was forced to rekindle them.

As comforting as the dancing flames had once been, all they did now was to serve as a reminder of the time fire had betrayed her, when it had reached for her with claws of twisting heat, screaming faces practically visible within its writhing depths, sending the trees crashing and exploding down around her, and driving her right into the arms of the enemy that lurked where there should have been safety.

And even if she had been able to hide what the games had done to her from her sister, there was no escaping the fact that she'd seen it all for herself on the huge screens that were displayed around the town during the gaming season.

Her breathing started to turn ragged, and she ripped her eyes away from the blood that still stained her hands, and clasped them together in an attempt to stop them from shaking that she knew would fail.

"See what?" She whispered, forcing her eyes to meet her sister's, forcing back the tears that always seemed so close at hand these days, forcing herself to try and seem normal, like the Katniss she had been before Prim's name was called and the world fell apart around her.

Like the Katniss she'd been before she understood why Haymitch acted the way he did.

She didn't know if she succeeded or not, but Prim turned her gaze to the sky, ending the internal war within her as she, too, was able to drop her eyes to the ground. "Hope." Prim said simply, destroying the fear she'd had that she, too, could see the blood on her hands.

But just because Prim couldn't see it didn't mean it wasn't there. So when her sister wrapped her arms around her in a hug, and she returned the gesture, her heart filled with dread at the stains only she could see that now decorated the back of her sister's dress.

As futile and useless as it was, she was going to protect her sister for as long as she could.

Even from herself.

Long after Prim left, she remained there, kneeling in the blood-covered snow, unable to convince her feet to move back into the house where Gale was still waiting, wounded and bleeding, with Peeta watching over him.

Seeing them together was too much. She couldn't separate what was real and what wasn't. What she actually felt and what the games had forced her to fake were no longer clear cut lines when both of them were in the same room together. She didn't know anymore if what she was faking for the cameras was an act. Sometimes it felt like the only time she really knew what she was doing was when she was being watched by all of Panem.

Then, at least, she knew what she was supposed to do.

But when the cameras turned off, and the rest of the world went away, all that was left was her, drowning in a sea of blood and lies that were tangled up in truths so much that she wasn't even sure which was which anymore.

It was a long while before she managed to go back inside, and she poured the snow onto Gale's back as gently as she could, trying her best to ignore the red that mixed with it even before it touched his skin, and only seemed all the more red in Peeta's presence.

Finished on 11/26/13, 3:24PM