SHE IS NOTHING as spritely as her fluid movements would suggest. no, living in these woods, off the land, has made her hard, rangy sinew strung between each of her bones like the other girl’s bow. there are different brands of it, hardness.
there is the kind of rough callus that coats her hands in spits & shines, the coarse grain of a warrior’s beard, the smooth stone cracking under her feet. she can see it in the newcomer’s features. except…
except on her, it looks like DETERMINATION, arrow head cheeks & a steely glint in the eyes that reminds her of the bottom of a pond, silver fish slipping in & out between her fingertips.
so, because she knows this brand of hardness, because she knows what it is to survive through a winter that strips flesh away like birch bark, she nods, shallow, to confirm the question.
❛ yes, ❜ her gaze doesn’t stray. they stay stock still, staring at one another like startled fawns on their bandy but confident legs, ready to run but immovable all the same. ❛ this is my home, out here, beyond the boundary, ❜ lexa explains. there’s nothing territorial in the way that she says it, but she flinches at the knowledge that they are all hunted, haunted. caves hidden in mossy hollows, beds made up of tree floss & grass & straw woven together, house not just her but tens more just like her.
they are small, their numbers shriveling, but they make it through the seasons. her shoulders roll back, eyes suddenly appraising of the kind of life she has never known.
❛ you have not seen my people before, ❜ she says plainly, though she has seen theirs, wrapped in armor, pressed into the shadows, sparking in electricity along the fence.
it takes longer than katniss would want to admit to for it all to come together in her head. perhaps all the years within panem and in twelve made a disbeliever out of her. but in a land of lies and poverty, some truths wall in her reality like no other. the seam is her home, moreso than just twelve can be called such a thing. the forest was even more home than that. and yet -––– for the girl before her. for others ? for more ? it was truly their home.
katniss always believed it had to be a truth that never was even whispered amongst the districts. leaving the fence and not coming back wasn’t even a question, wasn’t thinkable. ( she sees the two faces, a boy and girl just like her and gale, running, screaming, caught, taken by hovercraft and -––– ) but she digs further, deeper, harder, and the image of a little girl laughing amongst the woods with her comes and goes. it dances away quick, like the reflection of a river ; something that doesn’t stay and can’t, something taken away by more and more ripples each second.
she tried once to ask her father about it. about people beyond the district lines. don’t ask those questions, songbird, is all he told her. don’t ask me that in front of your mother, or ever. they don’t exist and can’t. she tried once to tell gale about the glance of a person -–– she was shot down. even at that young age she was too old for a dream as fantastic as that thought. but in front of her she knows it all to be true : people lived beyond the districts, in caves and the trees in the way she always pictured herself in that split second before sleep, the kind of dreams that you can’t stop yourself from having and don’t even want to at that point. perhaps a flicker, a glimmer of her lips upturn at the thought and hope that somehow the life in the seam never was able to take from her.
❛ i have once, actually. ❜
her voice comes up, and gives her up. she sighs and shakes her head.
❛ no, maybe not. my father told me
i was just seeing things. made up some
imaginary friend. but there still is a flash
of someone from when i was young.
someone my age who told me this is
where they lived. i -–– i don’t recognize
you. it must be true, right ? a memory,
not just a dream. ❜
