Just a Game {Everlark}

Chapter 5

PEETA'S POV ;

I carry on, yammering about brush strokes and lighting until I realise that my audience has grown unresponsive.
I look over to find Katniss asleep on the blanket, her eyelids shut lightly and mouth tilted open.

I feel the side of my mouth twinge upward at the sight of her sleeping state. I remember telling her long ago that she doesn't scowl in her sleep, and that it improves her looks a lot.

It's true that she looks beautiful while asleep. Her chestnut hair is falling free from its ponytail, soft curls adorning her face, strewn across the blanket. Her skin has not lost its sallow olive quality, and glows where the ray of sunlight breaks through the thick foliage above and shines across her neck in a choppy pattern that sways with the leaves.
Her mouth is open only the slightest crack. Her soft pink lips tease mine, knowing I am safe in the knowledge that they were made for eachother.

I tear my eyes away from Katniss as she adjusts her sleeping position, deciding to leave her in peace and return to my work.

Facing my canvas once more, I dab my brush in to a light blue watercolour.
I guess painting for me is like hunting for Katniss, therapeutic and consuming. I can get lost in a piece of work, spend hours that slip away like seconds pouring over a specific shade or light. With certain pieces, there may never come a point of total satisfaction, but I keep going, because perfection isn't something that we deserve, it's something we earn.
I look over at Katniss, who is breathing deeply in her slumber.
I don't think I'll ever do enough to have deserved the pleasure of earning her.

It's comfortable once more between us. We are happy together. We help eachother forget and remember. Forget the pain, remember the people. These are the softly whispered words we feverishly tell eachother late at night when the other has woken up in a hot sweat. When Katniss is screaming for her sister who will never come running, for little Rue, whose song has been silenced. For her innocence, which burned in the Mockingjay's flame.
Katniss can always sense when I've woken with a nightmare. I don't scream, or cry, or even call out. I simply lie there, petrified, in the terrifying nanoseconds it takes for me to realise that Katniss is there. That she is beside me. That she has not turned to ash as she does in my nightmare.
My nightmares alternate in a sickening wheel of fortune.
It could be the one with the ash, where I'm watching, helpless, as Katniss is slowly burnt to death, no spinning or pretty dresses, real flame. I watch as she screams for me to help her. To stop it. I watch as she can't scream anymore.
I watch as she burns down to ash at my feet, her four-note whistle echoing in the wind.
Another nightmare involves Katniss enduring the torture of the Capitol. It is Katniss and not I whom is strapped down to a table and cut, beaten, electrocuted, drugged, questioned, and injected with the Fear.
The Fear, i later found out, was Tracker Jacker serum. The same that made me lose my mind. When they used to inject me, I would feel my eyes droop and an agonised scream rise in my throat, somehow far away and all at once. The backs of my eyelids glowed bright red, then darker, flashing across one word in a bold black scrawl;
Fear.
That image will stay with me to the day I die, that word forever burned in to my brain, destined to haunt me every time I close my eyes.
Except in this dream, it haunts Katniss. She is crying out. Crying out for me, for Prim, for anyone to stop the static pain in her head, the distorted images in her mind, her urge to kill the very people she needed the most.
That dream always ends with Katniss's eyes shooting open, her pupils dilated and she's pure red, with a growl of the single word, "Mutt".
In every dream I have Katniss is torn away from me, physically or mentally. Gone without a trace, except for the scorch marks she left on my soul.

Katniss always wakes up when I do, when if I don't make a sound or move an inch.
Seamlessly, she will slide in to my arms, whispering to me. Telling me how it's going to all be fine. How tomorrow will be kinder. How we have eachother and always will.
How she loves me.
How I love her.
And how that is what keeps us both afloat.

Katniss seems to be sleeping lightly now, hopefully dreaming of the meadow and not the death that haunts it's ground and flowers.
Sometimes we have our good nights. We might get a whole nights sleep, or broken but calm sleep, most nights in a week. It's the bad nights that make us stay up later in fear of going to bed the night after.
On a bad night, neither of us sleep more than four hours. At the start, we didn't sleep at all, one or the other of us would wake, plagued by the horrors of our past, inconsolable in the memories that broke us down.

Sometimes we keep count. On a week with no bad nights, we will have a 'party'. Ill make a cake and ice it with a delicate pattern, Haymitch will bring a bottle of wine and his dry wit, if he hasn't had any bad nights either.

He used to have a lot more bad nights before Effie came to live in Twelve. She had been in the Capitol until about a year and a half ago, when she realised hat she didn't belong there anymore, that nobody really did.
Effie was having her bad nights in droves. All the past tributes she'd seen perish, corruption she's seen flourish and memories that shadowed her finally all caught up. She knew that us three were the only ones who really knew what haunted her, because it haunted us too.
In a sort of a muddled agreement, Effie moved in with Haymitch. Excuses were made about Effie 'looking for her own place' and 'just settling in', but Katniss
And I knew better, even if Haymitch and Effie didn't.
Haymitch doesn't sleep with a knife in one hand and a bottle in the other anymore. He sleeps with both arms wrapped around Effie now, and both of them know that's forever. They'll never marry. They don't need to.

I feel arms snake around my waist and a chin settle on my shoulder, warm and familiar.
"That's beautiful." Katniss mutters in to my ear, admiring my painting. It's nearly done now, just lacking in the finishing touches.
"Thank you." I put my hands over hers where they are clasped at my front. "How'd you sleep?" I ask.
"Lightly. I dreamt about the meadow." She replies with the answer I had predicted.
"Ready for a swim?" She asks, squeezing her arms tighter around my waist.
"Ehhhh......" I grin, swaying slightly.
"Come on! I know you don't like it." Katniss detaches her arms from around my torso and tugs on my arm, trying to pull me toward the bag under the large oak tree where we have our stuff.
I groan and let her drag me over, pulling off my shirt, shoes and pants, glad I had my swim trunks on underneath for easiness sake.

The day was only getting hotter, warming my skin. I tan quite easily, and I can almost feel one crawling up my skin as we pad toward the lake.
Standing at the edge, I watch the glistening water churn peacefully. I take in a deep breath, and feel it catch in my throat as Katniss tackles me in to the water.
Screaming and laughing, we break the surface of the water. I swim upwards, bobbing my head above the water, pushing my soaked hair back from my face.
Katniss pops up too, laughing hysterically.
"You will not get away with that..." I grin and start after her as she squeals and swims away.
"Noo!" She cries out, laughing, as I catch her around the waist and pull her back toward me, causing ripples to crease the waters surface.
And when we kiss, our lips greet as old friends.

--
Um guys??
Over 440 reads??
This is amazing! Thank you so much!
Again, I'm late with this chapter. I've been really busy lately, but please give me some indication if you're enjoying Just a Game!
Also- more of Peeta's POV? Opinions?

Thank youuuu!
-Jocelyn xx