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“Peeta’s been making a lot of bread.”
Greasy Sae tells her this as she scrapes eggs around the pan on the stove. At first, Katniss doesn’t react to this tidbit about her neighbor. He’s been back for a couple of months at this point, and Sae invites him around for breakfast every few weeks. Every time, he shows up at Katniss’s door with a warm loaf of bread that they slather in blackberry jam and eat with Sae’s eggs. Katniss always wonders if he wakes up hours before he comes over to make the bread fresh the same morning.
“Do you see much of him?” Sae asks after a beat.
Katniss glances out the window, as if she’s expecting to see him walking down the path. “Every once in a while,” she says eventually. “When I get out.”
They speak whenever they see one another, whether in Victor’s Village or in town. Part of her comes away feeling weird after every conversation with him, as if he’s not who she thinks he’s going to be. She braces herself for him to be the unkind, tortured boy she last knew in Thirteen and the Capitol, and when he’s not that, some selfish part of her wants him to be the same Peeta she knew before the Quell. Kind, thoughtful, steady. Maybe even in love with her. Instead, he’s somewhere in between, as if he’s trying to figure himself out, too.
“Do you?” Katniss adds after a moment, suddenly curious. “See him.”
“He comes by the stall every couple of days,” says Sae simply. The Hob, where Sae has revived her food stall, isn’t a black market anymore but an open-air market frequented by the people of District Twelve. Since the rebellion, over half of the citizens of Twelve that survived the bombing have returned home; Katniss thinks she must not have been the only one who disliked the forearm schedules and meager food rations. Now, the survivors visit Sae’s stall at the Hob in search of the same bowl of stew they’d eat after a twelve-hour shift at the mines. Somehow, the taste of home makes up for the completely unrecognizable landscape of their district.
Sae sets down a plate of eggs and oatmeal in front of Katniss. “Are you gonna get out today?” says Sae, sitting down at the table across from her.
“I don’t know,” says Katniss. “What’s for lunch?”
“Beef stew, if you’re coming,” she says. “Just got a shipment of beef from Ten.”
“Alright,” says Katniss.
They sit in silence until Katniss has eaten everything on her plate. As soon as she takes the last bite, Sae stands up, crosses the kitchen to wash the dish in the sink, and lays it out to dry. “I’ll see you at the Hob, then,” she says. “Don’t make me waste my beef.”
Katniss is nearly out of Victor’s Village when she hears a familiar uneven tread on the gravel behind her. “Hey! Katniss!”
She stops at the sound of his voice. “Hey,” she says after she turns around, uncrossing her arms folded across her chest.
“Are you going into town, by chance?” he asks once he’s caught up to her.
“Yeah,” she says. “Do you…need something?”
“No, actually, I just—can I join you?”
“Oh,” she says. “Sure.”
They head out of Victor’s Village, making small talk about the summer humidity and the state of Peeta’s garden. He thinks he planted things a bit late, but the summer harvest has proven to be fruitful. Literally—apparently he has tomatoes in abundance. “I’m not really sure what to do with all of them, to be honest,” he says. “I like tomatoes, but I’m just one person. I can’t eat all of them myself.”
“Could you preserve them?”
Peeta considers this. “I guess I could, in theory. The only thing is, they’re cherry tomatoes, and I don’t know if those are the best kind to can or freeze. I think they might be better fresh, but maybe I can put them in a bread or something.”
“Is tomato bread a thing?”
“I could make it one,” he says. “It wouldn’t hurt to try, especially if it means it’ll help me cut down on my tomatoes without throwing them out.”
“If you ever need a taste tester….”
“Then I know who to call,” Peeta says warmly.
When they reach the Hob, Katniss sees that Sae’s stall hasn’t opened yet and Peeta suggests that they wander around the market in the meantime. Katniss comes across an unattended display of different bars of handmade soap, and Peeta comes up beside her while she looks at them thoughtlessly.
Peeta clears his throat lightly and gestures towards a sign at the stand that says ‘Bathing Soaps.’ “I could do with a bath right now,” he says. “The humidity is something else.”
Katniss glances over at him, unsure of whether he’s trying to steer the conversation in a certain direction or just make small talk. She feels like they know each other too well for this sort of meaningless conversation, but maybe he’s forgotten how familiar they used to be. “Oh, yeah,” she says eventually. “But I feel like I always forget to shower these days.” She’s not sure why she's telling him this. Maybe he seems like he might understand.
“That explains the smell, then.”
“Ha-ha,” she says, though for a moment she worries he’s serious. She’s not sure when she last showered—three days ago? Four? It’s probably bad she doesn’t know.
One of the handmade soaps, labeled ‘Pine Goat Milk,’ catches Katniss’s eye. She picks it up and takes a sniff, and her stomach lurches at the scent. Fear and anxiety wash over her, and suddenly she’s nursing Peeta back to health in the cave, thinking of her mother and sister watching her back home in the Seam.
“This one’s the smell of the first arena,” she says to Peeta before she can stop herself.
He’s the only person who might understand, but it occurs to her too late that it might not be good to remind him of the Games. He doesn’t seem perturbed. “Well, that’s a bold claim,” he says. She holds it up to his nose. “The earthiness of it,” he says dramatically. “Just needs a hint of blood and sweat, and maybe a whiff of infection. Then it’d really be nostalgic.”
Katniss shakes her head and smiles to herself, returning the soap to its spot and trying to suppress arising thoughts of their time in the arena. Peeta, on the other hand, eagerly begins to examine all of the different bars of soap displayed. He picks one up, pretends to waft it towards his nose, and declares, “Okay, tell me this doesn’t smell like Caesar Flickerman.”
“Can’t say it does,” she says when he raises it up to her. “Though I, unlike some people, never smelled him on national television.”
“I did do that, didn’t I?” he says.
“You did.”
“I couldn’t remember the specifics. I think I just remember how he smelled, more than the actual interview—that would have been the first interview, right?”
“The first one for our first Games, yeah,” she says. “You two did a whole bit about the showers in the Capitol.”
Peeta moves on to another soap, apparently unaffected by the sudden walk down memory lane. “Mm, this one’s—ah, yes,” he says, dramatically breathing it in. “The mental ward in Thirteen.”
Katniss is so shocked that she can’t hold in the laugh that escapes her. “It smelled like—” She peers at the label. “—‘Spa Tonic’?”
“Don’t you think so?”
“You’d know better than I would.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “From my understanding you spent your fair share of time there, too.”
Before Katniss can say anything, the soap vendor reappears behind her stand. She’s thrilled to have customers, especially once she realizes who they are. Katniss would feel awkward leaving her stand without purchasing something since they’ve lingered there for so long, so she picks out a bar of hand soap that strikes her as a neutral-enough scent. It shouldn’t evoke any memories or an arena or the Capitol or Thirteen, at least.
Peeta appears to still be browsing for soaps, but someone behind a different stall calls out to him from across the way and waves him over. “Can you grab me one?” he asks, as he starts to head towards the other stall.
Katniss jokingly picks up the Caesar Flickerman soap and raises it towards him. “This one?”
“Go for it!” he says, before turning away.
After she’s bought the soaps, she joins Peeta at the dry goods stand while he pays for his own purchase. He explains to her that the ten-pound sack of flour he had ordered came in just yesterday.
“Must’ve been on the same train as Sae’s beef,” says Katniss.
“Oh, really?” he says. “Is she making anything exciting out of it?”
“She promised me she’d make beef stew for lunch,” she tells him. They head to Sae’s stall next, since it’s past noon now, with their newly acquired purchases in tow.
“What do you do with all the bread you make?” Katniss asks as they wait in line for stew. “Only, Sae said you’ve been baking a lot.”
“Oh, yeah,” he says, readjusting his hold on the sack. “It’s kind of a therapeutic thing for me, so I get Sae to give out the bread. I think sometimes she serves it here and other times she just gives it to the people she thinks need it. I know she knows more people in the district than I do, so….” It makes sense that he’d recruit Sae to help him distribute his extra bread. Peeta knows few of the returnees from Twelve since most of the folks that he grew up with were from town and killed in the bombings.
Sae doles out the stew herself, distributing generous portions to people as she pleases. Katniss carries Peeta’s bowl while his arms are still occupied by his flour, and the two of them head over the tables just outside the covered market. They eat without speaking for a few minutes. Katniss can’t think of anything to say that she hasn’t said already, and maybe the silence should be uncomfortable, but it isn’t. It does confuse her, though, this familiarity between them that was there before the war and seems to be reemerging now. Here, at this table, they could talk about anything and it would feel important.
Katniss suddenly becomes more aware of the spoonful of food in her mouth. “This isn’t made of your tomatoes, is it?” she asks Peeta.
“What? Oh. My tomatoes?” he repeats. “No. I think the ones in this are a different kind. But that’s a good idea, actually, I should make Sae take them.” He chuckles a little to himself. “I feel like all I talk about these days are tomatoes.”
“There are worse things to talk about.”
“I just never thought the first thing I’d ask people I meet would ever be, ‘Do you want some tomatoes?’” he says. “They’ve become my entire personality.”
“Has anything else grown nearly as much?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “Not really. I mean, plenty of things are growing—I’ve got some okra and some peppers that have been successful. But the tomatoes have set a high standard.”
“Are you going to make a stew?” she says. “You could use your whole garden at once.”
“I was actually planning on frying the okra, but I guess I could make a stew.” He pauses, and they start to speak at the same time. “Would you—?” he begins, at the same time she says, “Frying it?”
“Yeah,” says Peeta, answering her instead of finishing his thought. “It’s where you dip it in egg and then bread it—”
“I know what frying is,” says Katniss, though she can tell from his smirk that he’s only teasing. “I’ve just never heard of frying okra.”
“It’s really good,” he says. “We only ever had it for special occasions growing up. Usually—” He laughs a little. “Ironically enough, I think we’d usually have it with dinner after the Reaping.” She remembers those kinds of dinners. Most people in the district—except for two families—would go all out, throwing parties and potlucks and hosting all sorts of get-togethers, since Reaping Day was one of the few days that everyone in the district had off. It surprises her that Peeta remembers Reaping Day dinners, but maybe food helps make his memories decipherable.
Katniss realizes she hasn’t said anything for a minute. “You’ll have to find the proper occasion, then,” she finally says.
They stop by Sae’s stall to say goodbye before they head back towards Victor’s Village. On the walk home, they discuss the construction projects in Twelve and how they’ve already changed the landscape of the district. Peeta mentions that he’s gone to a couple of planning meetings, which surprises her even though it shouldn’t. For some reason, it’s jolting for her to realize that he’s functioning on his own, attending meetings about land surveying and infrastructure and machinery and not just sitting around and occasionally going into town or the woods like she does.
He explains that he’s looking into reopening some sort of bakery in town. The first thing he has to do is get a plot of land, so last week he went to the new Justice Building—which isn’t actually called the Justice Building, just the “district hall”—to figure out what land he’s entitled to as both a citizen of District Twelve and the only living member of his family. There are supposed to be policies in place for returning survivors’ land to them after all of the wreckage is cleared out; even though Peeta didn’t technically own his family’s land, he’s the only person who could possibly inherit it.
There’s a pause in the conversation and, with the talk of Peeta’s family, Katniss’s mind drifts back to their earlier exchange about soap. “Do you ever get flashbacks anymore?” she asks abruptly. “It’s just, when we were talking about the arena….” She trails off—Peeta knows what she’s insinuating.
“I’m not going to attack you,” he says lightly, “if that’s what you’re worried about.” He’s trying to make a joke of it. “I do get flashbacks sometimes, but they’re entirely in my head these days. Figuring things out, discerning what’s real and what isn’t. Trying to remember what actually happened.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Katniss. They’ve talked about this before, back when they were in the Capitol. She wonders if he remembers it, or if he was too far gone even then.
Peeta continues. “The worst part is probably that…I don’t know, when it’s just me, there’s no one to just tell me what happened and what didn’t.”
“When are things clear versus unclear?” It’s the first time we’ve talked about the hijacking since he’s been back, after months of small talk.
“I don’t know. From the first Games on, I guess. It’s not like footage of my life existed before that.”
“So you do remember things from your childhood? Like the Reaping Day dinners?”
“Yeah, sort of. Different things bring it back to me—smells, food. Songs. Things my parents or my brothers used to say. When something happens that reminds me of when I was younger, I can usually put my finger on what the memory is. But there has to be a spark, because otherwise I can’t really summon it off the top of my head, if that makes sense.”
“It does.”
“Haymitch must be sober,” says Peeta suddenly. They’ve reached Victor’s Village.
“Why do you say that?”
“He remembered to let his geese out,” he says. “I’m gonna stop by and see him, if you want to come.”
“I think I’ll go on home, but thanks,” she says. She doesn’t feel like dealing with Haymitch right now, not after the good day she’s had. Even if he is sober.
He smiles. “I’ll see you around.”
“Yeah, see you.”
A few days later, Katniss grabs her bow and heads out to the woods. She intends to spend the morning hunting, but it quickly becomes too hot and she can feel that her body is still too weak to move around in the heat for too long. She heads home sooner than she intends and heads upstairs to take a cold shower.
Since she got up this morning, her room on the second floor has become stuffy from the sticky heat outside. She opens the window, which vaguely reminds her of Peeta for some inexplicable reason until she remembers that he used to always sleep with the windows open. Sometimes it strikes her that he’s everywhere: when she opens the window or when she ties her shoes. Even when she drinks Greasy Sae’s tea and wishes she could put sugar in it without being rude, she thinks of how he used to never take sugar in his tea.
Less than a year ago Peeta was another person entirely, intent on killing her, and here he is now, quietly making bread for the district as he continues to recover. From the few interactions they’ve had since he’s been back, she’s assumed she was better off than him since he started from a place of being a shell of his former self. Now, he’s more recognizable to the Peeta she knew before the war than she is to herself, and she was never hijacked. She must not have the same inexplicable desire to get better as he does. Before the end of the war, she lived for her sister, survived for her sister, existed for her sister. It’s almost as if, to go on, she needs one person to live for, and she doesn’t have one anymore.
The whole district has moved on: Peeta with his bread, Sae with her stall, Haymitch with his geese. Twelve might not be in ruins like it was when she first returned months ago—the debris has been cleared, the bodies buried, the land revived—but she’s been living as if nothing has changed. Relative to everyone else, she feels she hasn’t come far enough.
She hasn’t spoken to Peeta since their outing to the Hob a few days ago. His soap is still sitting in her kitchen—she forgot to give it to him since he was occupied by his flour. After she’s out of the shower and dressed, she impulsively decides to head over to Peeta’s to deliver the soap.
When she opens the front door to leave, Peeta’s already standing on the porch. “Oh!” they both exclaim. She jumps, her heart racing from the unexpectedness of him being at her door. Her fight-or-flight instincts appear to still be intact.
“Sorry,” he says quickly. “I was just going to drop this by.” She notices the delivery in his arms: a metallic pan that must have some sort of bread in it, but she can’t tell exactly what it is. “Are you about to wash your hands or something?”
Katniss frowns. “What?”
“The soap?” says Peeta.
She looks down and realizes her fist has clenched around Peeta’s Caesar Flickerman soap. “Oh,” she says. “No, I wasn’t, this is yours, I was just going to…bring it over.”
“Oh, thanks,” he says. “I guess we had the same idea. Here, we can trade.”
“So, what’d you make?” she asks, accepting his pan.
“I got the recipe from Effie—” he begins, but Katniss interrupts.
“Effie?”
“Yeah,” says Peeta. “She calls every couple of weeks. She probably calls you, too.”
“Were you just going to drop this pan off and run away?” says Katniss bemusedly, disregarding his latter comment.
“I didn’t think you were home,” he admits. “I saw you leave earlier but I guess I missed when you came back.” He must have been keeping an eye out for her.
“Oh, yeah. I came back ’cause I needed to shower.”
“Oh. That’s good.” He pauses. “It’s good that you’re showering,” he tries again, then hesitates, realizing he’s not coming across as he intends to. “Just because of what we were talking about the other day, about how you forget to shower sometimes.”
“I mean, I still only took one because I’d gotten so hot in the woods, not because I actually wanted to, but it’ll do.” She regrets saying so much as soon as she says it, but Peeta appears unfazed.
“Hey, but that means you at least went out into the woods,” he says. “Small victories, right?” They both stand there, opposite one another, until Katniss lifts the lid of the pan and peers into it for the first time.
“Wait, are these tomatoes?” she exclaims. “In the bread?”
Peeta’s face lights up. “Yes!” he says excitedly. “Yeah, I was telling Effie about my tomato plight and how you suggested I could put them in bread somehow, and this focaccia thing is what she suggested.” He says ‘focaccia’ carefully, as if he’s rehearsed how to pronounce it.
“Interesting. Who knew tomato bread was an actual thing?”
“I know,” says Peeta. “And apparently there’s also this bread thing where you make a tomato sauce and put that on top of bread with some cheese and then you bake it. Effie told me about it. Did we ever have anything like that in the Capitol?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s what I thought. Apparently it’s all the rage there and she can’t believe we never had any.” Peeta smiles. “It sounds like something you’d like, though.”
“Really?” says Katniss. “Why’s that?”
“Didn’t you like those cheese buns from the bakery?”
She’s not sure what her face looks like—she’s confused and, admittedly, thrilled that he remembers this because even she didn’t. He made those cheese buns for her between their first and second Games. There’s no reason that any memories of that would have been hijacked—there shouldn’t be any video of their private exchanges back home in Twelve—but the fact that he’s able to recall that small detail about her, despite everything he’s been through since, surprises her. “Yeah,” she says, almost disbelievingly. “Yeah, I did. The ones with the cheese baked into the top. I’d forgotten about those.”
“Well, I’ll make some for you one of these days,” says Peeta. “And I’ll get Effie to send me the recipe for that bread thing from the Capitol. Maybe I can invite Sae, or drag Haymitch over for dinner. Would you maybe—would you want to come if I—?”
Katniss nods. “Yeah, sure,” she says. “Of course.”
There’s a beat, then Peeta glances down at the soap in his hand. “Thanks for this, I’ll go try it out.”
“Let me know how it is,” she says. “Thanks for the bread.”
“Of course,” he says, starting to turn away and head down the steps of the porch. “I…hope you like it.”
“I’m sure I will,” says Katniss quickly, before adding, “Do you—would you want to go ahead and come over for dinner…tonight, maybe? Without Sae. Or Haymitch.” She avoids his eyes, instead fixing her gaze on the pan in her arms. “I just don’t think I can eat this whole thing by myself,” she adds.
Peeta grins. “I can try frying some okra, maybe?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll see if Sae has any meat we could have, but…does six work?”
“Six is great,” he says. “I’ll see you then.”
“See you then.”