Mockingjay - Peeta Mellark (3)

}16{ - Wedding Cake

"Always."

In the twilight of morphling, Peeta whispered the word and Livia went searching for him.

It was a gauzy, violet-tinted world,
with no hard edges, and many places to hide.

She pushed through cloud banks, followed faint tracks, caught the scent of cinnamon- of dill.

Once she felt his hand on her cheek she tried to trap it, it dissolved like mist through her fingers.

When she finally began to surface into the sterile hospital room in 13, she remembered.

She was under the influence of sleep syrup.

Her heel had been injured after
she'd climbed out on a branch over the electric fence and dropped back into 12.

Peeta had put her to bed and she asked him to stay. As she drifted off, he had whispered something she couldn't quite catch.

But some part of her brain had trapped his single word of reply and let it swim up through her dreams to taunt her now.

"Always."

Morphling dulled the extremes of all emotions, so instead of a stab of sorrow, Livia merely felt emptiness.

A hollow of dead brush where flowers used to bloom.

Unfortunately, there was not enough of the drug left in her veins for her to ignore the pain in the left side of her body.

That was where the bullet hit.

Her hands fumbled over the thick bandages encasing her ribs and she wondered what she was still doing there.

It wasn't him, the man kneeling before me on the square, the burned one from the Nut- he didn't pull the trigger.

It was someone farther back in the crowd.

There was less a sense of penetration than the feeling that she had been struck with a sledgehammer.

Everything after the moment of impact was confusion riddled with gunfire.

Livia tried to sit up, but the only thing she managed was a groan.

The white curtain that divided her bed from the next patient's whipped back, and Johanna Mason stared down at her.

At first Livia felt threatened, because Johanna attacked
her in the arena, but she had to remind herself that she had done it to save her life.

It was part of the rebel plot.

That didn't mean she didn't despise Livia.

Maybe Johanna's treatment of her was all an act for the Capitol?

"I'm alive." Livia said rustily.

"No kidding, brainless", Johanna walked over and plunked down on Livia's bed, sending spikes of pain shooting across her chest. When she grinned at Livia's discomfort, she knew they were not in for some warm reunion scene, "Still a little sore?"