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ix. faith
AFTER THE TRAINING SCORE ANNOUNCEMENTS, Avonlea retreats to her room while everyone continues to celebrate Katniss and Peeta's successful week of training over dinner. Avonlea couldn't eat, she couldn't even look at the food set out on the large dining table without feeling nauseous.
Once the door was locked behind her, Avonlea stumbles to the bathroom as her tremulous hands latch onto the walls to keep herself up. She presses against the sink and looks in the mirror at her mutilated reflection, noticing the bruising already starting to appear around her eye and on the bridge of her nose. Dried up blood was scattered above and below her lip. She leans further over and spits into the sink, watching as the blood splatters on the porcelain tile.
She wets a small towel and starts wiping her face. Each time she hovers over a wound she thinks about how it had come to be and flinches as she relives the infliction. As she continues to clean her wounds, she holds back tears with a tight pout and furrowed eyebrows. She pauses, placing the towel back on the counter and stares at herself in the mirror.
"You are alright" she mouths, the words not coming out of her mouth but instead spoken in her mind. Her arms are shaking against the bathroom sink and her pout grows deeper as she refuses to tear her eyes away from her broken face.
"You are alright" She says again, this time letting out an airy sigh. She squeezes her eyes shut, murmuring the phrase again, raising her voice to a mumble. She drops her head and allows a singular tear to roll down down her cheek.
Avonlea gives herself sixty seconds to breath, compose herself and stand up right again. She grabs the towel once again and cleans the rest of the wounds without a break in her composure. Once she is done treating and wrapping them, she gives herself one final look in the mirror.
"I am alright"
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THE CELEBRATIONS WERE LONG OVER, once Avonlea crawled her way out of the depths of her room. The penthouse now seemed like a ghost town, with plates and leftovers still scattered across the dining table and unfinished bottles of alcohol abandoned on the bar. Avonlea finishes off a glass of bourbon sitting in front of Haymitch's usual place at the table and wanders down the hallway. Her original plan was to join Haymitch in his room and drink her pain away but after a quick moment of hesitation, she knocks on Peeta's bedroom door.
When he opens the door, his hair is fluffed up, presumably from running his hands through it, and his eyes are bloodshot. He looks over Avonlea's face which was now rid of the blood that had been smeared across it just hours ago, and invites her in without another word.
"Your training score was really great Peeta, you have a good chance at surviving" Avonlea speaks up first as Peeta takes a seat against his bedhead. "Against the careers? Against Katniss? No way, I may as well ask someone to kill me the second the siren goes off because I have no chance at surviving compared to them" He sighs, running his hand through his hair and messing it up even more.
Avonlea thought she'd have at least until the pre-game interviews before she started loosing Peeta but she was wrong. The softness in his voice had been switched out for a bitter tone and the light in his eyes was fading. Peeta was slowly loosing himself to the games and it broke Avonlea's heart to watch.
Avonlea moves to sit beside Peeta on the bed. She is cautious at first but when she receives no complaints from him, she leans against the bedhead beside him. "You can't start thinking like that Peeta, have a bit of faith in yourself"
Peeta ducked his head to hide the emotions playing across his face. While she was his mentor and was once a victor, he knew she'd never understand how different this was for him compared to her. The kids in district four started preparing for the games from before they were even old enough to be picked as tributes when they were forced to help around the district and familiarised themselves with tridents. Peeta was baker, he'd never handled any weapons, he couldn't even name half of the weapons in the training room.
Avonlea was thirteen when she went into the games and she still had a higher chance at winning than Peeta did now. She killed every other tribute in her games, Peeta couldn't even stab someone if his life depended on it. Compared to the other districts and even Katniss, he was weak, unexperienced, an underdog. "I've accepted my fate Avonlea-"
"I haven't" Avonlea interrupts him. He finally looks up at her and sees a flare in her eyes. He didn't understand it just yet but Avonlea had faith in him and she would do anything to make sure he had a fighting chance at winning the games.
"Listen Peeta, you have survival skills that a lot of the other tributes lack. You may not be as adept with weapons as the other tributes but we can work on that. How about I book out the training centre tomorrow morning and i'll give you some weapon training?" She suggests.
"Will you be well enough to do that? he asks. She hadn't lost him fully, she thinks to herself, that kind hearted Peeta was still in there.
"I'll be fine. Be ready by 7am, I wanna have as much time as possible" Avonlea tells him. She gets up to leave, hoping to get as much sleep as she can for the early morning she will have tomorrow, when Peeta grabs her hand.
"Thank you Avonlea, for everything: the advice, the comfort, the help. You're the best mentor I could've been given. You've made my last days a bit more bearable" Peeta smiles, his head once again dipping to hide the blush slowly covering his cheeks.
Avonlea didn't know what to say, she didn't even want to think about this being one of the last few days Peeta would be alive. For the past week she had only been thinking about the start of the games, no further. But as the first siren of the 74th Hunger Games grew closer, she knew she couldn't avoid what plays out after that for much longer.
"Don't thank me Peeta, you deserve it"
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authors note.
i wanted to dive a bit deeper into peeta's perspective of the training scores so here is this, its a shorter chapter compared to the rest but I felt it was kinda sweet and didn't need anymore :) hope you all enjoyed ! mwahh