Chapter Text
Title: No One Listens to a Zombie’s Scream
Done for the prompt here of "Prim and/or Katniss, my little sister is a zombie in a body with no soul in a role she has learned to play in a world today where nothing else matters, but it matters
She’s screaming and being held back by Gale’s arms and her sister is climbing on the stage and taking her place and she feels like her soul has cracked. The rest of the day moves forward in a fever dream and she remembers begging her to come back. Begging her to win and then she’s gone.
(in her darkest thoughts she hates Katniss because it wasn’t enough for her to save her life once she has to save it again)
Prim doesn’t know how Gale gets both of them home. Her mother hasn’t said anything since the Justice Building and she feels so numb that tears aren’t coming down. And then she’s shaking and her mother is preparing dinner. Prim wonders what they’ll do now. Her mother has her medicines, but Katniss has always been their breadwinner, their protector, and she can’t quite imagine her mother stepping into that role.
(she feels a flash of irrational anger that her mother who shut down when her father died doesn’t love Katniss enough to even seem to contemplate shutting down when her own daughter is on her way to her death.)
Morning comes and Prim wants to stay in bed. Wants to crush Buttercup to her and withdraw into herself like her mother did. Katniss may resemble their father more but at heart she’s always been her mother’s child. But there is a goat to milk and the day to face. And by the time she’s milked the goat she finds Katniss has saved her again when Gale drops the results of his morning game hunt by.
(everyone but Katniss sees the way he looks at her and she sometimes wonders how some one who can see ever squirrel in the tree can miss how much Gale loves her...and now she wants to cry because Gale will never have that chance.)
School is horrible. Everyone is happy it isn’t them, that it isn’t Prim, but no one can quite say that when everyone knows what happens to District 12 tributes. But Prim braids her hair and puts on her smile and gets through the days that follow. Though the girl on fire and the unexpected love story and the slow dawning of hope as Katniss makes it through another day. Prim makes it through the horror and love on Gale’s face; the awkward avoidance of Peeta’s brothers; and the teary gaze of Madge by putting one foot in front of another.
(for an instant she wishes she was in the arena because there it was kill or be killed...a binary black and white except Katniss finds away to make it be in color.)
Finally—amazingly—Katniss comes home and everything should be right again but she’s still putting on her smile because Katniss has changed. Tension is in the air and everything is wrong. Prim fixes her smile on every morning after she hears Katniss scream her nightmares into the night every night.
(but she’s screaming on the inside and no one hears.)