Living Lies ✜ Hunger Games x Reader

"Start Explaining"

You're pretty sure there are five senses.

Everybody knows smell, hearing, sight, taste, touch. They're the things that make the world come alive to us. Except, you're sure if that you should be dead. So, why exactly, can you still smell, hear, and feel the world around you?

Life after death was not a topic readily or often discussed in the Seam, the Hob, or District 12 in general. It was a kind of an unspoken yet unanimous decision that, if an afterlife existed, it couldn't possibly be worse than life itself—at least for people like you, Katniss, and Gale, and your families.

Out of all the things you were expecting when you swallowed those berries, an afterlife wasn't among them. You'd killed people, lied, albeit not of your own accord, but doesn't that stuff matter? You hadn't expected to be considered (by who you're not sure) worthy of peaceful post life. You were prepared to spend an eternity of blackness, trapped inside a body with no way out. Alone, with no escape from your own lost mind, you'd surely go insane—if insanity posthumously is possible.

But surely, you didn't expect to be able to feel things, or smell things, or hear things. Because, a), you lost a part of your hearing earlier in the games, and b), does an afterlife, good or bad, have thin and scratchy sheets?

You'll take that as a no.

Your senses have just started coming back. A faint beep steadily grows louder next to—surprise—your bad ear. Wounds heal after death, right? You figure. That's why my hearing's good. But it didn't explain the beeping.

What seems like hours later, you can smell things. Antiseptic. Rubbing alcohol. A faint tinge of blood. It smells like a more sophisticated version of the Everdeen's household. Well, there goes the whole "wounds heal" thing, you think to yourself, sighing quietly in your mind.

The next thing to come is touch. What feels like a worn thin and abrasive sheet material is pulled up to your neck, and the surface below you is made of the same stuff. There's a sort of strange throbbing numbness in your leg where the deep cut from the mutts is, and there's a cramping in the pit of your stomach, like somebody stuck a dull knife in it and twisted, accompanied by a headache and a fading yet stabbing pain in your chest.

You're not sure if having your senses misleading you is part of some sort of torture or if you're dreaming—because you're not entirely sure anymore that you're dead. Which, in reality, is scarier than death itself right now.

Bearings gained, you try and open your eyes. It's like a repeat of back when Peeta bandaged your bleeding head in the cave and you had to wake up. It's like lifting fifty pound weights with your eyelids. You're nearly exhausted by the time they're open.

It'd be so easy to give in and go back to sleep, but the first thing you see keeps you from doing so. A blanched white room, devoid of any color at all, seems like such an out of place room for Haymitch to be standing in. Especially when, you know, he's not dead, and you're supposed to be.

"Glad to see you're finally awake, sleeping beauty."

The first thing you feel like asking is "what are you doing here?" But that doesn't seem fitting, somehow, at least not right away, so you store away the question for later use.

Instead, you ask, "What do you mean finally?" The rasp in your own voice surprises you—it sounds as if you haven't spoken in years.

This question seems to have caught Haymitch off guard. Clearly, that was not the question he had expected from you and has prepared to answer, either.