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There is a certain routine to Kelly’s life.
She wakes up. She brushes her teeth. She washes with what little water she has. She goes to work in the orchards. She comes home. She does chores. She eats dinner. She goes to bed.
It is an organized life, and one with very little change. It’s structured and it’s easy, although working the orchards alone is hard work, but that is the cost of life in Eleven.
Her mother had wanted her to marry out of it. Kelly supposes she could have - could have had children, married a wealthy husband, lived a comfortable life. It wouldn’t have been hard, after all. She’s been told she’s easy on the eyes, and sometimes that’s all a man needs in a wife. It would have been the easier thing to do, the smart thing to do.
Yes, she could have done that, Kelly muses. But then she’d have been endlessly miserable, always wondering about what could have been, about what she could have done differently.
Well. She snorts derisively. It’s not like those questions don’t bounce around in her head every day anyways.
They’re honestly expected at this point in her life, embedded deep in the routine.
If she hadn’t submitted her name 26 times for the Reaping, would she not have been selected?
Would he not have volunteered for her?
Would they be living that ‘could-have-been’ right now?
They rattle around her brain every day, even ten years later. It’s hard to forget them, to be fair, what with the ring she keeps on a chain around her neck.
She feels Kino nose against her leg, and she sighs, leaning down to scratch the spotted dog behind the ears. He whines, long and low, and she grumbles under her breath as she straightens and tosses him a piece of meat. Less for her to eat, but she’s never been one to have a big appetite, so it doesn’t matter.
Kelly turns back to the dough she’d been kneading. It feels flaky in her hands, and she realizes with a certain kind of dull realization that it’s going to taste like crap.
He was always the creator between the two of them. People thought it was always the opposite - the dainty little woman and the giant brute, stereotyped beyond all belief. But Kelly can’t create anything to save her life; she can’t cook, draw, write, sew, or anything else that would make her a valuable housewife. She was always better at dismantling things, taking them apart at the seams and studying them until she knew them inside and out.
He, on the other hand, had always been the maker. He cooked, he drew, he sewed, he did all the things she couldn’t. He was blunt and mean at times, sure, but he was always the gentler of the two of them. He thought before he acted, she acted before she thought.
He balanced her perfectly. And then, all of a sudden, he was gone, and that balance was thrown to the wind, and she was standing on her own two feet for the first time in years.
A dichotomy. Hades and Persephone.
A fitting analogy, all things considered.
Kelly blinks, her gaze coming back into focus. She’s squeezing the dough roughly, and has to forcibly relax her hand. She stares it for a moment as she tries to reign her thoughts back in.
Her hands are dry and rough, calloused and bruised - worker's hands, she notes. Does he still have those kinds of hands, she wonders? Or have the hands of the Capitol soothed the long days of Eleven out of his body?
Somehow she doesn’t think so. She thinks he’d honestly rather have died than lose that final part of himself.
She wouldn’t blame him.
Kelly huffs through her nose, leaning against the counter with one hip as she rubs her face.
She misses Tyler, she thinks miserably. She misses him so, so much, and there is exactly jack shit she can do about it.
“God,” she breathes aloud, and she’s mortified to hear the choked quality of her tone.
Ten years. Ten fucking years and it never gets any easier.
Pain like this never really goes away, she thinks dully. It lingers, and it aches, and it digs down so deep it becomes a part of her she has no hope of ever digging out. It’ll always be there, lurking and waiting in the dark crevices of her mind, in the pit of her stomach, ready to pounce when her mind wanders.
She doesn’t try to push away the thoughts of him. To do so would be an insult to his memory. She’ll admit she misses him. She misses him all the time, every day, and it never really gets any easier.
The pain doesn’t lessen; it’s still there, consuming in its magnitude. Ready to drown her with the onslaught when the memory of that cursed day resurfaces. It’s still there, and it won’t go away; it doesn’t really lessen, but it does get easier to ignore it.
And ignoring it only works sometimes.
Kelly wipes at her face, trying to pretend that the hot tears aren’t there.
Just get through the day, she repeats to herself, the mantra echoing in her mind alongside the memories of a love long lost and faded what-ifs. Just get through today, and the next day, and the next.
There is a certain routine to Kelly’s life.
It is one that she’d rather die than keep living.
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'You'll never know how many dreams I dreamed about you / Or just how empty they all seemed without you / So kiss me once, then kiss me twice, then kiss me once again / It's been a long, long time.' - Vera Lynn, 'It's Been A Long, Long Time'