Archive of Our Own

Most of Twelve refuses to meet their eyes at the party. It’s supposed to be fun, a celebration of the final day of their Victory Tour. The kind of party only the Capitol could throw. The square is packed with tables groaning under the weight of all the food and drink and lit by bright paper lanterns which give the dull gray of the Justice Building a soft, colorful glow. Effie had been babbling on the train about how this was their chance to bask in their glory as victors right here at home, but instead, awkwardness settles heavy in the air like coal dust. The rest of the Tour had been a blur of lipstick kisses and unfamiliar landscapes and hollow words written for them by strangers, and now that they’ve come home, no one seems to know what to do with them.

Of course, Katniss doesn’t know what to do with herself either.

She reads her speech robotically, thanking her district for supporting her, thanking Haymitch for keeping her alive, and thanking Peeta for being there beside her. It’s the same speech she’s given in every district so far. She could almost recite it by heart now. In the beginning, she’d imagined that if she said it enough times it might become true. But instead, every word feels like cement in her mouth.

For months, she’s been on edge, terrified that someone would see through her pasted-on smile, her perfect skin, her feigned delight. And yet, no one has. Each stop on the Tour had been the same: the same empty words, the same restrained clapping, the same bored expressions in the crowd. No one had thought to wonder if she was genuine in her performance. No one had even cared.

When the party ends, she and Peeta walk back to the Victor’s Village hand in hand, waving behind them to the last stragglers who are still stumbling home in the night air. It’s only when they arrive in front of her house that he drops her hand like it’s still on fire.

“Well,” he says. “That’s it, then.”

That’s it. The end of their romance, at least until the next Games when they’ll have to trot out the act again for the Capitol cameras. He’s setting her free, releasing her of any further obligations to him outside of their duties as victors.

She wishes it made her feel better.

*

After that, she rarely sees Peeta. Occasionally, they trade strained pleasantries in the yard or taut smiles when they pass each other on the road into town, but mostly, they make a concerted effort to avoid one another. He bakes, she hunts. He paints, she pretends to know what chiffon is. She wakes up screaming in the night. He is nowhere to be found.

She still spends Sundays in the woods with Gale, though not even hunting can settle her like it used to. The mines have altered her friendship with Gale almost as much as the Games, and their once easy banter has become tense and uncomfortable, their common ground eroding beneath them. Often, they have nothing to say at all. She finds herself struggling to remember what it felt like when their lives were so tightly woven together that she couldn’t have imagined unraveling them at all.

As the days since the Tour begin to fade into months, the time she has left before the next Games begin starts to rapidly fold in on itself. The weekly calls from her prep team are filled with bubbly excitement over her first year as a mentor, a fact which looms like a dark cloud over her thoughts at all times. She avoids looking at the school these days, knowing the life of one of the children inside will be left in her hands in just a few short months. Even in an ordinary year, this would be an unthinkable task. But this is no ordinary year. No, their first year as mentors is a Quarter Quell, guaranteed to be even more spectacular and awful than usual. Her daydreams are consumed with speculating about what horrible twist the president will announce this year. Something especially gruesome, no doubt. She wonders if he will enjoy watching her fail.

For all their avoiding each other in Twelve, the upcoming Games are the one place where she knows she won’t be able to escape Peeta. He and Haymitch will both accompany her on the trip to the Capitol, leading their tributes to the arena come summer. The first time she sees either of them properly is when the three of them gather in Haymitch’s living room one cold night in March for the reading of the card. The reading is the first official announcement about the upcoming Games, meant to drum up excitement for what is sure to be an unforgettable year. It’s the first time they’ve all been in the same room since the Tour, and the tension in the air feels thick enough to choke on. In the days leading up to the announcement, she’s imagined a hundred nightmare scenarios: Prim being forced into the arena, Gale or one of his siblings being promised a spot, or even, unthinkably, herself for a second time. Her nightmares almost always revolve around the reaping lately. Every night is filled with thin paper slips and glass bowls and Effie screeching out name after name without end.

But now, she stands in front of the television with her fellow mentors, all of them shivering and avoiding each other’s gaze. Peeta’s jaw is set, and Haymitch nurses a bottle of white liquor. Katniss has bitten her nails down to almost nothing. On the screen, President Snow steps out and reads a long speech about the history of the Games and the punishments that were set out for the districts’ transgressions during the Dark Days. Then a small boy holds out a wooden box, and Snow draws out a crisp, white card.

“As a reminder that even the closest of families turned against one another during the Rebellion, each tribute pair will be reaped from the same family,” he reads.

She hears herself gasp. Siblings. That’s what he means. Every tribute pair will be a pair from the same family, forced to go into the arena with their own brothers and sisters, their own flesh and blood. The idea is abhorrent, but only one thought echoes in her mind: this means Prim is safe, at least for one more year. Katniss’ name cannot be drawn, and Prim has no other siblings who could be reaped, which means that Prim cannot be chosen. She had been so sure her sister’s name would be drawn this year that the assurance of her safety almost makes her fall to her knees, and she has to grasp the arm of a chair to hold herself upright.

But why? She knows Snow is still punishing her. He must want to continue to break her, again and again, until she has no choice left but to submit to him. Putting her sister in the Games would accomplish that easily. Instead, he has guaranteed her safety.

The thought only occurs to her later, when she is back at home, as she watches Prim bend over to pick up a stray sock and sees her shirt comes untucked in the back, forming the little duck tail, the same as the one that shocked her into volunteering at the last reaping. Snow is still punishing her, she understands, and he doesn’t need to send her sister the Quell to do it. No, the threat of her death is all he needs to keep Katniss in line. Sending Prim to her death in the Games so soon would give her nothing left to lose. This way, Snow still has her under his thumb.

*

On the day of the reaping, there is only one large bowl on the stage. Inside of it are thousands of strips, each carefully printed with the names of every sibling pair in the district. Each pair is entered into the reaping as many times as the two of them put together. This includes tesserae, so some pairs already have hundreds of slips in the bowl. Of course, this means the odds are stacked immensely against Seam families, who are far more likely to have several children of reaping age and far more tesserae than anyone in town. But then, the odds are always stacked against them anyway.

Effie, much to her annoyance, has not been promoted to a new district despite Katniss and Peeta’s victory last year, and has chosen bright purple hair and an ugly green suit for this year’s reaping. Katniss, Haymitch, and Peeta all stand behind her, spines erect and faces unmoving, freshly scrubbed clean by their prep teams, and dressed in strange Capitol fashions that make them stand out like large, awkward birds perched on the shabby wooden stage. No one moves as Effie draws out the names of a boy and a girl, written together in shaky handwriting, the names crowded next to each other on a single slip.

The boy is fifteen and his sister just thirteen. Too young, Katniss thinks, and too fragile. The two of them are from the Seam, naturally, as she had assumed they would be. Neither of them looks as though they’ve had enough to eat a day in their lives, and the girl looks like she’s about to faint, clutching at her brother’s arm while they weave their way to the stage. Unlike last year, when Katniss had thrown herself into the center of the square to protect her sister, no one steps out to protect either one of them. And who would? Even an act like Katniss’ was unprecedented. Today there will be no volunteers, no devoted sisters to step in and save them. Today, there is no sound but the wind in the square.

When the reaping finishes, Katniss and Peeta are ushered onto the train while the tributes finish saying their goodbyes to their families. Effie and Haymitch follow soon after, and the four of them sit around the dining table to wait, no one speaking. Peeta folds his hands in his lap and Katniss puts her head down on the table.

“Well, I think I’ll have a drink,” says Haymitch, twisting the cap off a bottle of expensive Capitol whiskey.

When the boy and the girl finally do board the train, they find the four of them waiting there at the table. Katniss can see the tear tracks on both of their faces, can hear the girl’s sniffling, can see the boy biting hard on his lower lip. They don’t have a chance, she thinks again. They might as well be dead already.

No one speaks at dinner, and Haymitch works steadily through his bottle of whiskey. Dish after dish of steaming hot food comes out, though Katniss can barely choke down the first course. Every bite takes an enormous effort to swallow, as if her body is refusing to allow anything other than fear inside of it. The clattering of the dishes seems to rise in volume as the meal goes on, and she has to keep wiping her palms on her lap, unable to get rid of the clammy sweat that collects on them.

Once the dessert has been brought out, a tower of golden cookies in a sweet, white cream, the boy speaks at last.

“So – you just won. Together. Last year. What advice do you have for us?”

She can’t bear it any longer.

“Stay alive,” she says, and stands up so quickly that her chair tips over. Then she locks herself in her room and refuses to come back out for the rest of the night.

She wants to stay there for the rest of the Games, bolted away from it all in her old room on the tribute train, buried under thick blankets and pretending not to hear the muffled conversations outside. But soon, too soon, an Avox comes in and rouses her, and they are pulling into the Capitol station and being hurried onto the platform. A private car takes them to their quarters in the Training Center, and she finds that she can barely breathe in the elevator. As the numbers count steadily upwards, she feels like she’s being marched to her death all over again.

The days leading up to the Games are filled with afternoon garden parties and long, boring dinners they have to attend in order to catch some early sponsors for their tributes. In public, she is the picture of a perfect mentor: enthusiastic, in love with Peeta, thrilled to be mentoring in a Quarter Quell in her first year as a victor. In private, she’s in ruins.

She spends any time that she’s not required to be somewhere shut in her room, ordering her food to be delivered and ignoring the persistent knocks on her door. She enjoys it, in some twisted way, wallowing in her misery. Isolation is better than whatever else awaits her, and she gladly gives herself over to it.

They force her out of her room for the tribute parade, and she makes her first appearance at a meal since the train at breakfast. She’s deluded herself into thinking no one would even notice her absence from the preparations, but Peeta corners her by the elevators as soon as the boy and the girl are sent away to their prep teams.

“What are you doing?” he says. It’s the first time he’s really spoken to her in months.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve barely said a word to either of them. You wouldn’t say anything helpful, even when they asked. You’ve spent the last two days locked in your room. What’s your plan here? To just let them die? To be even more useless than Haymitch?”

His righteousness makes her blood boil. She welcomes the rage, letting it set her aflame. It’s better than the emptiness she’s felt since the reaping.

“What are you going to do then, Peeta? Coach them into a win? Tell them to do a double suicide trick so they can both make it out alive? Because that worked out so well last time!”

“I’m going to at least try to help them!” he cries. “They deserve that – at least. They deserve someone trying.”

“Well, I can’t,” she says. And it’s true, she can’t do it; she can’t let herself get to know these children, learn their names, let herself get attached to them. Because what will she do when they have to die? She can’t volunteer to save anyone if they’re already in the arena.

“So that’s it? You’re just going to give up?” he says, his face filling with disgust.

“Yeah, well,” she mutters. “Maybe you’re just finally seeing me for who I really am.” A coward. A disgrace. Worthless.

She wants him to argue with her, to tell her that isn’t true, that she’s just scared now but that it’ll get better, to take her in his arms like he had back in their cave and promise her that everything is going to be all right.

But he just shakes his head.

“Yeah,” he spits. “Maybe I am.”

*

Peeta mentors the tributes together, coaching them through their interviews and offering tips for making the most of their time in the Training Center. Portia and Cinna turn them into burning embers in the chariot, and Caesar makes them out to be an endearing and unbreakable pair. The audience fawns over them, made beautiful by Cinna’s hands and sympathetic by Caesar’s words. Katniss keeps her distance. She still doesn’t even know their names.

The girl dies almost instantly once the Games begin. Thirteen is too young, and she’s too weak from the years of malnourishment, so the dagger finds her chest before she can even try to run away.

The boy, on the other hand, has clearly been listening to Peeta, and he sprints for the edges of the arena as soon as his sister falls beside him. He makes a show of it – swearing to avenge her, gathering supplies, showing off the skills he’s learned in training. He rigs snares, gathers himself food, and even forms an alliance with the girl from Nine.

Katniss and Peeta are swept onto broadcasts together to sing his praises and beg for sponsors. In the mentor room, she watches as Peeta chooses the parachutes wisely, sending the boy a knife and a loaf of bread when the money starts to flow in on the third day. Anything to support the new mentors, the Capitol donors keep saying, anything for the star-crossed lovers. Everyone wants to see them succeed.

To her credit, she plays her part perfectly, holding his hand for the cameras and staring up at him with stars in her eyes. He spins the boy’s survival into a performance worthy of the Capitol: praising his devotion to his sister, his resourcefulness, his manipulation of his ally. She nods along when she’s supposed to, repeats his pleas for money to the Capitol audience, and puts her arms around him in adoration when he says something particularly wonderful. It works, or it almost does. The supplies flow in; the parachutes fall freely. The boy survives.

But even the most generous Capitol sponsors cannot save him from the tidal wave that drowns him by the lake after nine days in the arena.

On the train home, she finds Peeta in the back car, his forehead pressed against the window and his eyes red. She sits down beside him, taking his hand in her own. He flinches when he feels her touch, startled by her closeness – there are no cameras here, no reason to pretend. He doesn’t move to her, like she had hoped, but he gives her fingers a light squeeze in response. She doesn’t forgive him for what he said, and she knows he hasn’t forgiven her for what she’s done. But in this moment, rolling past the hills and valleys that mark the way home, they have only each other, and they allow themselves this tentative truce for the night. They sit there like that for hours – his head against the glass, their fingers interlaced – until they both fall asleep.

*

After they’ve been dropped off back in Twelve, they retreat back to their old habits. The brief cease-fire from the train is over, and she does nothing to stop it as they sink back into pointed silence. Only rather than the detached awkwardness that had followed the Victory Tour, this time, it’s as if she can feel Peeta’s fury radiating at her from three houses away. The worst part of it is that she knows he’s right to be angry with her – he’s often right when it comes to things like this. Always doing the decent thing, the good thing, always helping the helpless. She hates him for it.

But no matter how much she resolves herself to hating him, she still finds herself waking up in the night and searching for arms that are never there.

So, one Sunday, when she and Gale are finishing up in the woods, a good haul of squirrels and turkeys spread out between them, she gently places her bow and arrow beside her on the rocks and kisses him.

Gale pulls back, his eyes wild and shocked.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she answers, and kisses him again.

This time he kisses her back, hard. His lips are warm, she notices, but not with the dry heat of a fever, only the soft warmth of a day spent hunting. He smells the same as he always has, like woodsmoke and pine needles. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wonders what Peeta would think of her now. Then, she shoves all those thoughts aside and loses herself in Gale’s mouth.

After that, she and Gale fall into a routine. They meet in the woods on Sunday, hunt, kiss, then make their way back to the Hob to trade. They don’t talk about it. Instead, they talk about where birds might make their nests in the trees, or what shape to best lay out a set of snares. She does her best not to compare Gale’s kisses to Peeta’s.

But the guilt of the tributes’ death weighs on her like a stone. Now, when she sleeps, just as often as she watches replays of her own time in the arena, she watches the boy drowning in the wave, his lips forming her name, begging for help that she never offers. She knows she’s a monster – anyone who wins the Games is one. But now she sees it reflected back at her in striking detail every night in her dreams. No matter what she does, she can’t get the boy’s face out of her head, can’t escape the feeling that she’s done exactly what Peeta had tried to stop her from doing: she’s become something she’s not. Complicit. Disgraceful. Just another piece in the games.

She wants to talk to Haymitch about it, but he’s dead to the world every time she goes by his house. She can’t burden Prim with it, so she brings it up to Gale one day, before they start the kissing but after they’ve escaped deep into the woods, where no one can hear.

“Katniss, you can’t feel guilty for that,” he says. “You did everything you could.”

“But I didn’t,” she insists. “I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t do anything.”

“Well, then, you just have to figure out how to deal with it,” Gale says. “You can’t feel guilty for still being alive. You can’t save everyone, all the time. There’s no point in dwelling on it. You can’t let the Capitol control every thought in your head.”

She doesn’t kiss him that day, not even when he leans into her by the fence. How could he get it so wrong? The Capitol controls her mind every minute of every day. Even when she kisses him, she thinks of the Capitol. Of Snow. Whether or not he knows about her time in the woods with Gale, and how he’ll punish both of them if they’re ever found out.

She doesn’t kiss Gale anymore, after that.

She finally manages to rouse Haymitch early one morning, pouring coffee down his throat and forcing him to eat a bowl of soup that Hazelle left bubbling on the stove. He glares at her from the kitchen table while she busies herself cleaning his kitchen. She wants to ask him how he dealt with it, at first. How he could have watched, every year, when he was forced to send these children to their death. He’s her mentor, isn’t he? And she needs some advice.

“I need help,” she says when he finally looks alert enough to hear her.

“Good morning to you, too, sweetheart,” he grumbles, pushing the soup around in his bowl without taking a bite.

“Haymitch,” she says, pleadingly. “Please.” She isn’t in the mood to be criticized today.

“Alright,” he sighs. “Let’s get started then. What’s your grand plan this time? Date one of the boys half the year and pretend to be in love with the other the rest of it?”

She hates him, so much.

“I ended things with Gale.” She didn’t come here to talk about boys.

“Well, that’s good to hear. Because you want to know something? You’ll never be the person you were before the Games again,” he says. “There’s only one world now, and it’s after. It happened. You can’t go back.”

“I know that,” she says.

“I don’t think you do,” he replies, abandoning his stew and looking straight into her eyes. “I want you to tell me how this little scenario plays out in your head. You think they’re ever going to let you do anything other than spend happily ever after with that boy? You think you’re just going to get to come back to Twelve and kiss a new coal miner boyfriend every year after the Games and nobody is going to bat an eye? Tell me, Katniss, how do you see this working out?”

She wants to tell him to shut up, to leave her alone about it, because that’s not what she came here for. But the words stick in her throat as the reality of what he’s saying starts to unfold in her mind. No, she will never have a life with Gale. She knows that now. But what Haymitch has just said is more than that. She will never be allowed to have any life in Twelve, any life without marriage, or children, or reapings. In that moment, she sees the wasteland of her future spread out before her. Whatever small scrap of agency she ever had has been snatched away. She has no choices. She has no alternatives. She will have to marry Peeta.

Anything she might have wanted to say to Haymitch dies on her tongue, and she slumps back into her seat.

Haymitch scoffs at her, taking a long drink from a bottle of red wine. Then, his expression softens.

“You might try starting with an apology,” he says.

*

She hates Haymitch, most of the time, but she hates him the most when he’s right.

She makes her way to Peeta’s house in the late afternoon, knocking on his door before she can lose her nerve. He doesn’t mask his disbelief at seeing her when he opens it, but he steps aside to let her in. She stands awkwardly in the living room, unsure of what to do with her hands.

He looks at her expectantly, waiting for her to speak.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She’s not sure what she’s apologizing for at this point. The way she acted during their Games. Her refusal to help their tributes as a mentor. Her confusion about her feelings for him. All of it at once, probably.

She’s gearing up for a fight, her pulse quickening, and her feet ready to run for the woods when he inevitably starts shouting at her. But it never comes. Instead, he runs a hand through his hair and lets out a long, tired sigh.

“I’m sorry, too,” he says. “I haven’t been fair to you.”

That takes her by surprise. She hadn’t expected him to even open the door, much less apologize to her himself. But she doesn’t question it, because they’re speaking again, and he didn’t throw her out of his house the second he saw her face. This is already going better than she had dared to hope.

“It’s just – it’s so hard,” she says. She wants to tell him everything, to run to him, to cry on his shoulder. But she isn’t sure she’s allowed to.

“It is,” he agrees. “And we aren’t doing each other any favors by acting this way. I won’t pretend I haven’t been angry with you. But – well,” he pauses, shaking his head. “I don’t think I can do this alone, Katniss.”

“Me too,” she says. “I mean – I can’t. Can’t do this alone.”

“Let’s not, then,” he says. “We both know we can manage better together. In a way, we’re lucky. At least we have each other. Most victors don’t have that.”

“I know,” she hears herself saying, “I know.”

He does take her in his arms, then, wrapping her up like a child and resting his chin on the crown of her head. She lets herself relax for the first time in months at his touch, letting the tension seep out of her bones as he holds her. She thinks she might fall over if he lets go. He doesn’t.

They stand there like that for several long moments, letting everything else go unspoken. What good is there in rehashing what’s already been done? He’s let her back in. It’s enough, more than enough. When they break apart, she doesn’t let go of his arm.

“I talked to Haymitch,” she begins.

He nods, and she keeps talking, drunk on the idea of having him back. “It’s just – we don’t really have a choice, anymore. We never did, I guess, from the minute I pulled out those berries. We’re bound to each other now. For life.”

He looks as if he understands her meaning. She feels an unpleasant clench in her stomach at the way his mouth turns down at the idea.

“So, you mean –” he trails off.

“Eventually. Yeah. We’ll have to get married.”

He smiles ruefully. “Have you broken the news to Gale?”

She wishes he had just slammed the door in her face. At least that would have hurt less. Her blood turns to ice in her veins, and she’s so angry all of the sudden that she doesn’t say another word to him as she pushes him away and storms out into the yard. He’s apologizing, somewhere behind her, but he doesn’t follow her as she stomps across the grass. Good, she thinks. Let him stay away, for good this time. It was a mistake to think that they could ever be friends after everything that’s happened.

She wants the tears to come, but they refuse. Instead, she feels hot anger bubbling up inside of her. She’s so angry at everyone. She’s angry at Peeta, for being petty. She’s angry at Gale, for not understanding her. She’s angry at Haymitch, for telling her about the future. But most of all, she’s angry at Snow, at the Capitol, at the Games for refusing to let her be.

But she’s so tired of being angry. That was supposed to be the deal: stay alive, win the Games, and you get to live the rest of your life in peace. Only now, she’s more trapped than ever. A never-ending labyrinth. A trap with no way out. An arena of her own design.

*

She hears him before she sees him. She always does. He couldn’t walk quietly to save his life – literally.

She’s kicking around in her backyard, trying to look busy. She never knows how to fill her time anymore, what with her fake talent for designing clothes and her lack of any real skills other than hunting. Besides, ever since things broke down between her and Gale, even the woods don’t comfort her like they used to. There’s nowhere left for her to run.

“Katniss,” Peeta says, approaching.

She ignores him, continuing to kick at a pile of leaves.

“Look, I’m sorry. I had no right to say anything about you and Gale. The truth is, I was jealous. Honestly, I still am. You had him, and I was so alone. But I told you I would be fairer to you from now on, and I meant it. It won’t happen again.” His apology is sincere, she knows that.

“Fine,” she says, still refusing to meet his eyes. She hadn’t considered how it would have looked to Peeta, when she abandoned him for Gale after the Tour. For some reason, she had assumed that he’d find someone else to talk to, perhaps that he would return to his childhood friends as well. Instead, she left him to struggle alone through the same nightmares she was facing, without a thought for his feelings. She’s despicable.

“It’s not – I’m not mad at you,” he says, haltingly. “I’m mad at everything. At this whole situation. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair, not to either of us. But like you said, we don’t have a choice anymore. So, maybe we could just, I don’t know, start over.”

She stops kicking.

He continues. “Remember when we were talking, the night before our Games, and I said how I didn’t want to them to turn me into something I’m not? And you said that I’d have to, and I said I thought that even within the structure of the Games, there’s still a way to stay me? Like, they could force us to kill someone else for their entertainment, but we could still choose not to let them turn us into monsters. Maybe we have to find a way to be us in the framework of this – this whole thing. We don’t have a choice in what we do, maybe. But we do have a choice in who we are.”

She wishes she could laugh at him. Tell him he’s being ridiculous. But a small part of her wants to think he’s right. That there is some way to still be herself in this nightmare. Only she can’t imagine what the real her would do right now.

“But I don’t know how, Peeta,” she admits. “I don’t know how to be myself anymore.”

“Okay,” he says. “I get that. Then what do you want? You don’t have to know how to be yourself. Just tell me what you want, right now, to happen?”

That’s easy. “I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to have kids. And I don’t want to have to go to the Capitol every year to send our friends to their deaths.”

Peeta chews on his lip. “Okay. Honestly, I don’t how we manage that.”

She goes back to kicking the leaves.

“Let’s start with something a little simpler,” he suggests. “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

That wasn’t what she was expecting him to say, and she scrambles to find an answer. Tomorrow? She barely thinks about what will happen in the next hour, unless Effie calls her and tells her she has a schedule, which hasn’t happened since they got back from the Capitol.

The truth is, she wants to go hunting with Gale. She wants to toss him berries and take him fishing and forget any of this ever happened – but she can’t. It’s like Haymitch said: there is only one world now, and it’s after.

“I want to do something I’ve never done before,” she says.

She’s never actually thought about it, but once the words are out of her mouth, she finds that it’s true. She’s tired of trying to reconstruct her life was from before the Games, because it only makes everything that’s happened since even more painful by comparison. No, she wants to do something completely new, with no old ghosts or ancient memories to taint it.

“That’s a good idea,” he says. “Like what?”

She looks back down at the leaves beneath her feet.

“Maybe we could plant a garden.”

*

The garden turns out to be harder than either of them expects, but it’s absorbing work, and she welcomes the distraction. Plus, it gives her and Peeta something to talk about, some common goal that has nothing to do with the Games or the president or their nightmares. Haymitch gives her an approving nod from his front porch when he catches her and Peeta walking back to her house together one afternoon, and she stares pointedly down at her feet, refusing to give him the satisfaction of having been right.

They try to buy everything from the Hob and the greenhouse in town, but they still have to put in several orders from the Capitol for fruits and vegetables that they can’t find seeds for in Twelve. It was Peeta’s idea to turn it into an edible garden, one anyone in the district can come and eat from, and then they can give out food to anyone who comes to her mother’s house in need. They have more than enough to give away already – but it feels better to think that they might be able to give them something they’ve made themselves. Not tinned food from the Capitol, but fresh food grown from the soil right here at home.

Then comes winter, and the ground is frozen solid and buried under several feet of snow, which puts a distinct damper on growing anything. So, they busy themselves by drawing diagrams of the garden’s layout, discussing how they might distribute any extra food, and putting in orders for tools. Some nights, she lets herself stay at his house past dinner, playing chess by the fire or pretending to listen while he shows her how to make cheese buns. Whenever she leaves, he asks her the same question: what do you want to do tomorrow? Every time, she answers honestly – order a new set of shovels, beat you at chess, pick out a good place for tomatoes to grow. Then he walks her home, and she waits in the darkness for the nightmares to come again.

When spring finally breaks through, they spend their days side by side, hands buried deep in the soil and knees muddy and sore. She surprises herself by genuinely enjoying their quiet camaraderie. If anything, it’s a vast improvement on last year, when they couldn’t look each other in the eye. This year’s Games are fast approaching, and on particularly warm days, she feels the cold hand of dread on the back of her neck when she imagines the upcoming reaping, the train rides, the interviews. She’ll have to do better this year, she knows, for him. But that knowledge does little to untangle the knots in her stomach.

On a warm afternoon in May, she comes back from the woods carrying a bundle of forget-me-knots and finds him weeding one of the garden beds.

“I thought we could plant two bunches. Near the gate. One for each of them,” she explains, holding out the tiny blue flowers.

Peeta looks at the blossoms solemnly, then nods. It doesn’t bring the tributes back, doesn’t make their deaths any easier to bear. But it does promise them something, even now. Remembrance. Commemoration. Two forgotten tributes from District Twelve, being given a place of honor in their mentors’ front lawn. Later, when the sun is setting and the air around them turns golden and smooth, they pat the flowers into the soft earth next to the gate, gripping each other’s fingers when their hands meet beneath the petals.

By the time the first breaths of summer sweep into the air, some of their spring onions are ready to eat. They harvest them together, Katniss placing them gently in a woven basket while Peeta reaches deep into the garden beds to gather them.

“Is this going to be your new talent, then? Gardening?” he asks her jokingly, turning around with flushed cheeks and dirty fingers. “Seems you’ve got a knack for it. Much more so than dressmaking, anyway.”

“No,” she says, adjusting the basket on her hip. “This isn’t for the cameras. This is just for us.”

She’s walking on air, light on her feet, and high on the pleasure of his soft touch on her elbow when they parted, when she bounces in her front door. It takes her several moments to see the look on her mother’s face, to notice Prim’s awkward hovering.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise when she walks into the study and finds herself face to face with President Snow.

*

“Good evening, Miss Everdeen,” the president says amiably.

She grits her teeth, trying to ignore the scent of blood and roses that fills the room. Her fingernails still have a layer of dirt under them from the garden. “Good evening.”

“Please, sit,” he says, gesturing to the second chair in the study. He’s seated behind the desk, as if he’s a teacher about to scold her for misbehaving. He probably is here to scold her for something, she thinks, though she can guess that her consequences will be much more serious than a slap on the wrist. She perches on the edge of the huge leather chair, her whole body vibrating with fear.

“You have a lovely home.” He runs his hand across the smooth, wooden desk.

“Thank you,” she manages, trying not to meet his eyes. Why has he come here? She thinks of her mother and Prim, standing in the front room. What had he said to convince them to let him in?

“I won’t waste your time, Miss Everdeen, if you agree not to waste mine,” he says, and his tone makes her feel as if an icicle has just been dropped down the back of her shirt. “Can you agree to that?”

“Yes,” she replies.

“Good,” he says. “Then I’ll get right to it. I wasn’t impressed with your performance at the Quell.”

“Performance?” she asks, feigning confusion.

“You have just promised not to waste my time, I believe,” he says. “You would do well not to lie to me, now, in the interest of keeping that promise. I think you know exactly what I mean.”

She thinks back to the broadcasts she filmed during the Quell, how the sponsors were tripping over themselves to catch her and Peeta before they left the Capitol. How many dinner invitations had she had to turn down because her schedule had been too full? Everyone believed in the certainty of their love for each other, everyone had been dying for a moment with the famous star-crossed lovers. But apparently, however well she thought she’d played at being in love with Peeta during the Games, she still hadn’t satisfied Snow. He still saw her as a rebel, a traitor bent on destroying the Capitol with her berries and her songs and her refusal to bend to his will.

Snow continues. “I had thought, by sending you back to Twelve, that the whole thing could be forgotten. That short of bringing you out once a year for interviews as a mentor, we could bury the whole thing. But I did not anticipate, Miss Everdeen, just how difficult you planned on being.”

“What are you talking about?” She’s been nothing but cooperative with the Capitol, sending them statements when they write to her and showing up on time for her appointments. She hadn’t even caused a stir at the reaping.

“Do you think I don’t know what you’ve been doing in Twelve?” Snow says, his tone suddenly shifting from manufactured cordiality to cold accusation. “Tell me, is your cousin well?” Suddenly, it hits her. He knows about her weekends in the woods with Gale. He knows about her very public indifference to Peeta. He knows the whole district has been talking about it. He knows about all of it.

The president sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Again, I had hoped the whole charade would be forgotten as quickly as it started. But it seems I was mistaken. You have alerted almost your entire district to the fabrication of your love affair by disappearing into the woods with that boy every Sunday. You should hope the gossip doesn’t spread beyond your inner circles. News travels fast in Twelve, I’m told.”

He can’t know about the changes of the past few months, how she and Gale are all but entirely estranged, how Peeta has only just now started speaking to her again. She’d deliberately kept both those facts private, away from the prying eyes of even her own family, trying to sort it out from the inside. But from the president’s perspective, she has been doing exactly what everyone else thinks she has: devoting herself to Gale, ignoring Peeta, and generally doing the opposite of what she’s expected to do. She’s caught in one of Gale’s snares, a rabbit struggling to break free, and the more she fights to keep her freedom, the faster the wires tighten around her.

“Luckily for you, I think we can come to a simple solution. The citizens of the Capitol are clamoring for you and your – what do you call him these days? Your boyfriend? Your beau? Your lover?”

“I just call him Peeta.”

“Fine. For you and your Peeta.” Snow suppresses a smile, plucking a rose from the vase on the desk and twirling it between his fingertips, examining it like a bug under a microscope. “I don’t think you’ll be returning to Twelve after these next Games. We just can’t bear to have you so far away these days.”

She can’t breathe. The room is spinning around them, and the only thing keeping her in place is her fingers gripping the edge of the upholstered chair.

“Why don’t you just kill them, then?” she asks. “Kill them all and let me stay here. It would be easier, anyway.”

“Now what would be the point in that? I have no reason to kill anyone in Twelve, at least not yet,” he says. “Everyone in the Capitol is just dying to see you two again. I should think a wedding, sometime this year, would lift their spirits.”

“And if I say no?” she says, lifting her chin in defiance. “Then what?”

“Oh, I don’t think it’ll come to that,” he says. “No, Miss Everdeen, as long as you agree to cooperate, I think you’ll find yourself very happy with life in the Capitol. Your next year as a mentor is sure to be a hit, especially after your wedding. Unless, of course, your sister’s name gets drawn from the reaping bowl again.”

He sweeps himself up, brushing past the desk and turning to face her from the other side of the room, his hand resting on the door handle. “That would be a real stroke of bad luck, now, wouldn’t it?”

*

Her conversation with Snow fills her with such terror that she doesn’t leave her bedroom for three long days. Her mother brings her food on a tray and tells Peeta she’s caught a summer cold. She stares out the window at their little garden, the pea shoots just beginning to sprout, and tries not to cry when she thinks about how she’ll never get to see it again.

She decides, in her stupor, to tell nobody about Snow’s demands – she tells herself it’s to save them the pain of her leaving, but really, she can’t bear the idea of saying goodbye. No, it will be better to simply disappear one day. There will be letters, phone calls, and someday Prim and her mother will be allowed to visit her in the Capitol. This is no occasion for tearful farewells.

Before she knows it, the reapings are upon them again. Again, she stands at the back of the stage with Haymitch and Peeta, though, unlike last year, the ice between her and Peeta has begun to melt. She wants to relish in their newfound friendship, to grab at his hand for support, but he stands just too far away for any displays of affection.

Two children from the Seam. One seventeen, one sixteen. Both are a lost cause from the moment their names are called.

This year, she tries. Learns their names. Coaches them through interviews. Makes appearances at galas and balls to beg for sponsors. None of it matters when they’re both dead within seconds.

She tells Haymitch and Peeta about Snow’s ultimatum one night when they’re gathered in their old quarters in the Training Center and only once the Games are winding to a halt. She expects Peeta to be furious with her, for not telling him sooner, but he only nods quietly and says he’d expected something like this to happen for a while.

She’s the one who brings up the marriage proposal, suggesting that they do it live on television sometime next month. Snow has ordered her to cooperate, so cooperate she will. Peeta agrees, then vanishes to his room for the rest of the night. Haymitch gives her a pained look, but offers nothing else. She wonders if this is how she’ll feel forever, like someone has sunk a hot iron poker directly into her chest.

They get engaged on a special airing of Caesar’s nightly talk show, only a few weeks after the boy from Four has been declared the winner of the Seventy-Sixth Hunger Games. The recorded taping of their show, Effie excitedly reports, has been pre-ordered by over half the adults in the Capitol. Cinna dresses her in a pale pink dress with sleeves that flutter around her shoulders when she walks, and Caesar tears up when he sees them crossing the stage, arm in arm. After a short interview, where they profess their undying love for each other and reminisce about their own time in the arena, Peeta gets down on one knee and pours his heart out to her – and the cameras – and Katniss does a fantastic bit where she pretends her tears are ones of joy.

*

They move into a little apartment just outside of the City Center. It’s an ugly thing, with boring beige walls and high ceilings that make their every step echo ten times over in the barren rooms. They’re close enough to the president’s mansion to be sure that they’re always being watched, but still far enough from the busiest streets that they have a little balcony overlooking a small park. It’s a small comfort, Katniss thinks, when on one windy morning she stands outside and breathes in the smell of the trees from below. If she closes her eyes, sometimes she can almost imagine that the winds bring the smell straight from District Twelve.

They’re allowed a long engagement, not because anyone cares how they feel about it, but so that people have time to vote on every aspect of their wedding: the food, her hairstyle, what color pocket square Peeta will wear.

For all their public appearances as a doting couple, at home, they stay out of each other’s way. The budding friendship they had formed last spring has already begun to wilt with the pressure of their arrangement, and, unable to think of a way to salvage it, she does her best to simply leave him alone. He bakes in the morning while she sleeps in, then withdraws to the study to paint away the nightmares while she fills the time writing letters to Prim that go unanswered and fills the walls with paint swatches she’ll never actually put to use. They still play chess in the evenings, his soft “checkmate” the only word that passes between them some days.

She does spend one afternoon crying into his shoulder, after she had sent a letter requesting that Prim be allowed to visit for three days on the next train from Twelve. The letter had come back within hours, stamped across the middle with bright red letters that read “denied.” She understands, then, the conditions of her prison sentence. Snow has no interest in killing her family, not really. He plans on keeping them alive but locked away from her, holding their lives over her as a bargaining chip until she bends to him. They will live, but only as long as they are dead to her. No visits. No letters. No calls.

She sleeps in the bedroom while Peeta takes the couch, a fact which fills her with guilt and self-loathing when she sees him lying there one morning. While she rolls around in a bed the size of her old room back home, he spends the nights clinging to the side of their lemon-yellow sofa, his feet hanging off the end. He never complains, and she’s too terrified of ruining their precarious arrangement to say anything about it, so she lets it continue without further discussion.

She isn’t sleeping, anyway, despite a parade of Capitol doctors who give her breathing techniques, herbal teas, and eventually, pills which only drag her down into nightmares she can’t escape.

It’s one of these nights, when the pills are her only choice after almost a week of sleepless nights, when she wakes up to the sound of her own screams and finds Peeta leaning over her in concern, shaking her shoulders. She scrambles away from him, still half in the dream and convinced he has come to kill her at last.

“Katniss,” he’s saying. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Not real. Whatever it is, it isn’t real.”

She’s still making that strangled sound, shaking her head, when he climbs into bed with her, holding her in his arms until her breathing has settled back into a steady rhythm.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and she hates this. How she’s always apologizing to him. How badly she’s fumbled everything.

“You don’t have anything to be sorry for,” he whispers against her hair.

They stay like that for several long moments, until her breathing quiets and the sharp edges of terror begin to recede. And she feels so safe, finally, with his steady heartbeat thundering in her ear, that she wriggles around and presses her lips to his.

“Stop,” he says, pushing her away.

“What?” she asks. “We’re engaged now, anyway.” As soon as she says it, she knows it was the wrong thing to say.

“Come on,” he says in a choked voice, and when she tries to lean in again, his fingers circle her wrists and he pushes her away again, more firmly this time. “Katniss. Stop.”

When she wakes up the next morning, she finds him back on the couch.

But after a few more nights of this, her screaming her head off in the dark and him coming in and calming her down in his arms, he gives up and joins her in the bed from the start. They fight the nightmares off together that way, her back pressing into his chest and his breath tickling her cheek. The dreams don’t get any better, but the aftermath does. At least, she’s less afraid to close her eyes when she feels him breathing beside her.

Things begin to warm up between her and Peeta during the days, after that. She doesn’t try to kiss him again, and he doesn’t bring it up. He spends less time with his paintings, and she spends less time staring at the color swatches. One morning, she wakes up to find him making breakfast in the kitchen, the soft light behind him lighting his hair like a halo, and she feels that feeling again, that same peaceful comfort she’d first felt when they started their garden back in Twelve. When he hears her behind him and turns to her with a grin, she feels an electric shock go through her and mumbles something about forgetting her dressing gown, hiding in the bedroom until her heartbeat slows back down.

There is no routine, no daily duties to fulfill anymore. He doesn’t have to bake, and she doesn’t have to hunt. Some days there are endless meetings about who should be included on the guest list at their wedding and which hairstyle is leading in the polls. Some days there is nothing, just a great expanse of time that they fill with increasingly intense games of chess and elaborate meals that neither one of them really wants to eat.

The park behind their apartment has a large enclosed pool on the other side, just across the boulevard. The pool stays mostly empty during the week, so she takes it on herself to teach him to swim. It’s relaxing, mindless exercise, and after a few weeks, he can keep himself afloat and practice his strokes without her holding on.

One afternoon, they pass the time floating on their backs in the center of the pool, gazing up at the clouds drifting past above the glass ceiling, their voices rebounding off the huge white marble walls. He lets their shoulders bump together, and she surprises herself by laughing when he splashes at her from below.

“Is this it?” She turns her head to face him in the water. “The rest of our lives?”

He doesn’t answer, instead disappearing under the surface and coming up on the other edge of the pool.

“See? I’m learning,” he says, standing up in the shallow end. She watches the beads of water run off his curls and drop back into the water, hoping some of the ripples will reach her from half a pool length away.

His question from back in Twelve becomes something of a refrain for them. When they settle into the bed each night, he will ask her in a low voice, the same question: “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

The answers rarely vary. Swim. Eat. Beat you at chess.

On a particularly crisp autumn day, after a long swim and a lazy picnic lunch in the park, they walk to the grocer on the corner of their block. He needs more flour, he says, and she needs eggs. They wander aimlessly around the store, drifting apart and picking off boxes of prepared food and cans of preserves. She wonders when this became her life – endless aisles of endless food, and all the money in the world to pay for it. She’s just looking for Peeta, to mention this to him, when she finds him crouched in front of the wall of milk cartons and laughing with a young girl.

When she approaches, he straightens back up, still chuckling. “Did you know, Katniss, that the sun can burn your skin if you’re not careful?”

The girl nods solemnly, as if this is crucial information Katniss might have otherwise missed.

She stretches her mouth into a smile. “You’re kidding,” she says. The girl’s mother comes by and sweeps the child away, apologizing for distracting them, then scolds her daughter for speaking to strange people in the aisles.

Peeta laughs again and brushes the back of his hand against hers, then reaches up to pick out one of the small cartons of cream. Katniss knows the sun can burn you – she feels like she’s just swallowed it whole.

She avoids Peeta’s eyes for the rest of the day. Some things are too bright to look at directly.

*

Their wedding is the event of the century. It’s a spring wedding, the flowers just peeking out of the ground and the wind still carrying a chill even on sunny days. The day before, it pours rain all day, and Effie flies into a panic about how the reception will never work and they’ll have to order tents. But when she wakes up on her wedding day, the skies are blue, and the birds are singing. The rain has left everything clean, washing away the dirt from the streets and leaving the grass shining with dew.

She gets up before Peeta, leaving him sleeping beside her, the blankets tangled in a heap by his feet. Quietly, she brushes her teeth in the little bathroom off their bedroom and splashes water on her face. Her prep team is due to arrive in fifteen minutes, and she pours herself a cup of coffee while she waits for them at the kitchen table. She feels strangely calm for such a momentous day; she might still be in a dream, she thinks, as the sun climbs higher into the sky. She closes her eyes, imagining that when she opens them, she’ll be back at her house in the Seam, with her mother smoothing her hair back, and Prim sleeping softly in their bed, and Gale knocking at the door to walk her to school.

The knocking, at least, is real, and she is forced out of her imagination by the arrival of her prep team. She catches one last look at Peeta, watching her from the doorway to their bedroom as she’s whisked down the stairs.

In the dressing room, everyone babbles around her. Her old prep team arranges her hair and covers her face in light but somehow still impossibly thick makeup. A tall, thin woman with teal-colored skin hands her a bouquet of roses and arranges a spray of tiny white flowers in a crown around her head. Cinna comes in quietly and she slips into a long white dress, the fabric light as a feather and weightless around her waist, as if not even gravity can keep her from floating away.

She doesn’t see Peeta again until the event, when she finds him waiting at the other end of the aisle. Haymitch has been called in from Twelve to give her away, the absurdity of which is not lost on either of them. There’s nothing left of her to give, and if there was, it would already belong to Peeta. She passes through the wedding like a ghost, reciting a paper filled with words for him that she didn’t write, gorging herself on the fluffy white cake, dancing in a small circle with Peeta until her feet hurt too much to go on. The party wears on until the first fingers of morning reach across the night sky, and they sit together at the front table and watch the celebrations, whispering to each other behind their glasses and drinking sweet champagne that makes her head spin.

When they finally fall into bed, the sunrise turning the sky a deep orange, Peeta laughs, and she buries her face in his neck.

“So,” he says. “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

She pulls back, gazing down at him on the sheets beneath her, her arms bracketing his. “I want to have a toasting.”

Peeta goes still below her, his breathing coming in shallow gulps.

“I do,” she says, knowing he doesn’t believe her. “You said it yourself, back in Twelve. All they want is to break us. To turn us into a show, something to be watched. But we have to find a way to be ourselves within this.”

He still doesn’t speak, studying her face, looking for proof that she doesn’t mean what she’s saying. But he won’t find it, she thinks. She’s never been more serious about anything.

“You asked me, once, what I wanted. Well, what I want is to marry you. For real, this time.”

She expects him to argue, to disagree with her, to tell her she doesn’t know what she really wants. She prepares a hundred answers, about milk cartons and mockingjays and morning swims. She’ll have to convince him, but she knows what she wants this time.

But he doesn’t argue. He doesn’t even hesitate.

“Okay,” he says simply, and kisses her.

*

Early afternoon sunlight is coming in sideways from the window when she wakes. Her head aches a bit from the champagne, and she looks over to see Peeta’s hair spilling out beneath his head on the pillow. She kisses the tip of his nose, and he blinks himself awake, the bewilderment in his eyes giving way to pleasure when he sees her face. He pulls her in for a long kiss, and she closes her eyes and shuts out the rest of the world, just for a moment.

He promises to make the bread for the toasting, the heavy bread with raisins and nuts, the same bread he’d tossed to her in the rain all those years ago. A recipe from District Twelve. A taste of home.

She makes a point to get in his way in the kitchen, flicking flour into his hair and licking it off his cheek when he reaches up to brush it away. She feels a ball of happiness expand in her chest when he lifts her onto the counter and kisses her there, her legs winding around his waist and his fingers undoing her braid. Why had she waited for this? It’s only the rest of their lives.

She lets him build the fire in their hearth, the bricks in front of the grate growing warmer until they can’t stand the heat any longer, and she has to get up to find a blanket they can kneel on. As she’s coming back, her breath catches in her chest when she sees him waiting there, poking at the fire, his cheeks turning pink with the warmth of the flames.

He looks up at her, searching her face for any last hint of hesitation. But it won’t be there, she thinks, and she kneels down beside him. She rips off a chunk of the bread, spearing it onto the long fork, and he puts his arms around her, covering her hands completely with his as they hold the bread in the flames. She leaves it in just a little too long, letting it burn, the crust going black around the edges.

It’s too hot to touch, really, when it comes out, but she takes it in her fingers, tearing it into pieces and feeding it to him while he laughs. She tries not to think of Prim, of Gale, of her mother. Of all the people who should be here with them. There is only one world, and it is after. There is only one life, and it is now.

“I’m glad it was you,” she says once they’ve finished, resting her head on his shoulder and watching the last of the glowing embers spit off tiny showers of sparks.

“Me too,” he murmurs. “I just wish things had been different. I wish you could’ve chosen me.”

“I did,” she says, turning to face him. “I did.”

When Peeta presses into her that night, she feels her whole body go up in flames. But this isn’t the hot blaze of the arena or the sharp flashes of fear and anger that she’s all too familiar with. It’s a slow, controlled burn, and it’s one that consumes her, melts her, from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. Katniss, the girl who was on fire.

But this is a new kind of fire altogether.

So, after, she gently rests her cheek on his and whispers into his mouth, “What do you want to do tomorrow?”

He rolls them both over, wrapping her up in his arms and tangling their legs. He kisses her neck, and she feels the flames licking at her again. When he speaks, she feels his voice in her whole body, her head tucked under his chin while the moonlight paints the room white.

“I think it’s time we plant a garden in the Capitol.”