Chapter Text
It isn’t until the sun feels consistently warm on my skin that I see Peeta again.
I’ve been having a bad week, and I haven’t forced myself into the woods in a while. I’d only managed twice, after seeing the return of Peeta and the primroses, to head out there. But I’m without the strength I used to have, and I could only get a fourth deep in double the time that I could a year ago. I can’t even picture myself in a tree.
Greasy Sae and her granddaughter, Maudie, had come and gone for breakfast. Like usual, I picked around the cornbread and some sort of simmered green-filled plate, chewing what I could, and swallowing even less. Sae had sighed, and tidied up the painfully empty kitchen, then scooped Maudie right up onto her hip. Despite her age, and her hardship in life, she’s a spry woman. I wonder if she really is as old as the face she wears, or if that's just what life in District 12 does to you if you survive it. Prim didn’t.
“It’s a wonderful day, girl,” Sae interrupted my thoughts, as if she could tell what I was thinking. She strode over to the window above my sink, and pushed it out, exaggeratedly sniffing the outside breeze before continuing on. “Why don’t you head out in those woods of yours, aye? I’m running low on some turkey and Miss Maudie doesn’t much like the look of ‘em,” she asked. I had just stared at her, as mute as usual, and watched as she shook her head and carried Maudie out of the house. My house. But not my home. It never really was, anyway.
Something in me, and I’m not sure what, tells me to go and find some turkey, though. So I wash up, braid what little is left of my recovering hair, and get dressed. Actually dressed, too. My fathers hunting jacket is safe around my body, I look more like myself in it. More like him, too.
I don’t know what has convinced me to check on Haymitch, either. I haven’t seen him since he tried to get me to eat some stale, chewy bread. He drunkenly told me that “this isn’t what she’d want,” and I threw my plate at the cabinet near his head. I hadn’t meant to hurt him, I didn’t hurt him, but he seemed to get the hint after that. There was a weird look in his face, too. Not anger, not hurt, even, but remembrance? Familiarity, maybe? And the broken plate stayed there until the next morning when Sae cleaned it up.
His door is unlocked, like how mine usually is, and I just shove my head in. I don’t expect to see him, slouched down against the hallway, so close to the door. I begin breathing through my mouth, a habit I learned whenever I went to my mentor’s, and shake him awake. I jump back before he can swing at me, another habit, and ask if he wants anything from the woods.
“What’da think? Bottles grow out there, huh? On trees?” He slurs and staggers away down into the mess that is his house. I shake my head, wonder why I even bothered, turn on my heels, and slam the door.
I steal a glance across the yellowed grass to Peeta’s house. For a minute, I’m just standing here, on Haymitch’s porch, waiting. I’m not really looking at his house, more the treeline behind it, the dead hedge fence around the other houses, and the sprouts of green in the lawn dividing the Victor’s Village left from right. Anywhere but his house actually.
I don’t expect anything from him. How could I? Yes, he came back here, but maybe he had no choice, like I did? He probably wants to get on, starting his life from scratch. A life without me. I don’t want the star-crossed lovers, not since the Capitol got their hands so deep in his mind and made him forget me. But, surely, he could want to be my friend? Peeta and I agreed to be friends, while stopped before District 11 on the miserable Victory Tour.
I think his last act of kindness to me was the primroses, though. Closing the door on the part of our lives that was together, just like the locket and my pearl in the Quell. My pearl! The thought of my cool, perfect pearl brings me out of my thoughts and starts my legs moving. I don’t know where it is, I think I left it in my damned Mockingjay suit when I assassinated Coin. When Peeta stopped me from taking the nightlock pill. I don’t know why he did. With Prim gone there was nothing left for me. There still isn’t anything.
I make my way into the woods, going through my usual route in the Meadow. It unnerves me now, in a way it never did before. A lot of things, though, do now. Just…the Meadow seems the most reasonable. The smell of death is strong there, a smell I know will wake me in my nightmares every night. And the green hasn’t yet returned. I can’t even think of Seam. It must’ve lit so fast, with the way coal dust seeps into everything it touches. I remember my father hated the way it made everything filthy. He was a happy man, at least in the way I remember him, but I saw him at his worst when he tried to clean our hovel. It lights so easily, eventually, I assumed he was scared a fire would start when he was laboring in the mines and would come home to a dead wife and dead daughters. Did I burn faster, in my heavy Capitol coat, or the Seam? I don’t dare ask about anyone else burning the fastest because I know that Prim would win.
At that sickening thought of Prim I brace myself against the trunk of a tree, trying to catch my breath. She’s dead. I watched my baby sister get blown apart. I will never see her gap-toothed smile again. Never hear the squeak of her laugh, feel the kick of her legs in bed, or braid her feather-soft hair. I don’t know how her hair was so soft. We were so malnourished. Any sustenance we got should have gone to keeping us alive, not making her tress silky.
I don’t even make it much past the old fenceline when I give in and sob. I don’t sob like this often, raw and unfiltered. I remind myself of Buttercup, yowling at the top of his small lungs after I tried to drown him. How could I have ever tried to take him from Prim?
I dig my palms into the rough stones beneath me, trying to ground myself. Not many have come back to 12-District 13 hasn’t lifted their travel restrictions yet-so I’m not worried anyone will see me. Not down by the Meadow, at least. The reconstruction crews may pass through what was the town square, but not here. My palms sting nearly as bad as my eyes do, and they, too, start to water in their own way. Little blades of blood drip into the earth beneath me, but I don’t care. It isn’t helping.
I let my body give in to gravity and lay completely on the ground. It isn’t comfortable, or clean, and I couldn’t care less. Not when Prim is dead and I am alive. Big sisters don’t inherit little sisters’ cats. I should be dead and Prim and my mother should be here, rebuilding our district. But she’s not. And it’s my fault. My berries, my arrows, my fire. Gale’s fire, too, and Coin’s coolness, Snow’s wrath, the Capitol’s hunger. But my stubbornness. I should have taken the nightlock, and died, like I was supposed to.
My tears make the dirt below turn to mud, not unlike the last of Winter’s slush melting a few weeks ago. It doesn’t make me stop, though. They spill from my eyes, drawn to something outside of me, and slide down the left side of my face. The side with the most burns, the most patchwork skin. My firemutt side. The side where chunks of my sweet, little sister charred my skin, marking me forever as the girl who was on fire.
Laying there, I hear him before I see him. The gait of a boy who relearned how to walk at 16, but, only this time, with complete control of just one leg. Peeta.
“Katniss?” he calls out to me, and I want to shrink away, run into the woods and hide my palms, my tears, my burns. That can't be how he sees me again. Nearly a month ago he saw me, awaiting my death, with my hair matted, skin hollow, and eyes without light. I’m not sure I look any different at all, just the same fear and wounds.
But I don’t run. I slowly open my eyes as I sense him unsteadily crouch down near me. I peer up at this boy, the boy I was going to sacrifice myself for in the Quell, and see his patchwork skin, too. He looks down at me, concern clear in his eyes, no longer Capitol-foggy.
“Hey…” he starts, noticing my hands that are still dug into the ground. “How long have you been out here?”
I suck air into my lungs and whisper something close to “I don’t know” and avoid meeting his gaze. Peeta inches closer to me, though still an arms length away, and lays himself down. He’s on his back, bad leg arched, and is looking at the tree boughs atop us. It's warm out today, not hot and heavy like the Summer, but warm enough to feel uncomfortable in my jacket. He must feel the same, because he fiddles around with his long sleeves before pushing them up past his elbows, revealing more patterned skin.
“You wanna go home?” Peeta asks after a while, and I nod.
“You want help up?” This time, I hesitate. I don’t want him to think I’m weak, or take notice of just how badly my palms bled, but I also don’t think I can get up. I think he catches on to my thinking, though, and he offers me a hand anyway. I take it, staggering to my feet, feeling unnatural in my own body. He quickly links his arm through mine, and walks me back home.
He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t ask me what happened. I think he can assume. Each step I take hurts, I guess I was laying awkwardly for longer than I thought, and it feels like ages before I reach my empty house again. But, Peeta doesn’t just drop me at the door, he walks in and sets me up at the kitchen table, pulling out the chair with the orange cushion. Sewing was one of the ‘talents’ the Capitol tried to get me to latch onto after winning the 74th. I couldn’t make much more than a square, but Prim liked how “homey” they looked, so they stayed. There's two green and another orange, too.
“Let me see your hands, Katniss,” Peeta directs and I listen, bringing me out of my head. My hands are boney and thin, looking much older than a 17 year old’s should. I know I haven’t been eating, and he can tell, but he doesn’t say. Maybe he heard about the plate throwing. He asks where the bandages are, and I lead him to the cabinet closest to the sink. I wash my hands there, before sitting down again in my soft, wooden chair. He grabs my left hand and wraps the gauze around it, wrapping a few times before stopping and moving to the next. It’s worse, being my dominant, but he makes do.
“Why were you in the Meadow?” I ask him, “did…did you hear me?” is all I can pathetically mutter quickly after. Peeta’s face turns from soft to softer. He does a once-over of my hands, moves back to put the gauze away, and sits down in the chair next to me. Green cushion.
“I don’t know where my family is buried,” he chokes, tears welling in his eyes. I feel mine doing the same. “Or…even if they are buried there? Snow wanted to kill our families. I don’t even know if there were enough of them …to bury…” Peeta trails off, and I think about the skull I kicked when I came back to 12 the first time. Was that Peeta’s mother? His older brothers, his father? Or was it Madge, my old teachers? Whoever traded in Hob with me? I know that their blood is on my hands.
“Oh, Peeta, I’m so sorry,” is all I can muster. One small, clear tear leaves his eye before he quickly blinks the rest away. He gets up to leave but I move after him, pulling him into a hug.
This hug feels worse than the last one. His breathing is shaky, mine is rapid, and my fingers grip the collar of his shirt, sleeves still rolled up, at the nape of his neck. He’s grabbing right below my arms, holding me flush against him, finally letting out one solid, single, cry.
“Stay. Stay for dinner? Sae makes it for me, they’re about as bad as they were at the Hob,” I explain to him, but I’m not doing a very good job at selling him. He slowly breaks away from the hug, turning, I think, to wipe his face, and says,
“Okay. Dinner. When?” and I tell him the time. He brushes himself off, fixes his hair a little bit, and walks across the way of the kitchen. He stops for a moment and turns back, saying “I’m gonna invite Haymitch,” before leaving for his house.
𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧
Dinner is awkward. Much like the meals we ate on the train to the 74th Games, Peeta makes conversation with Haymitch while Sae flits around the kitchen. She’s making a soup, like usual, with chestnuts and bay leaves. I take to watching Maudie toss around some of my mother’s old knitting yarn at Buttercup. I think Buttercup would be more fun to play with if he hadn’t been so mean as a kitten. I guess he just never learned how. Crazy Cat was the closest to play we ever got.
Sae’s worried about my weight, and I can tell because she ladles out the most soup into my bowl, and halves the cornbread from her own plate for me, too. Haymitch picks around his bowl, a lot like I do, and decides to start eating. Peeta didn’t take much convincing. He must be glad to not make himself any dinner, for once. There's nobody to take care of him anymore. I’m not really sure there has been for a while, though. I turn my attention from Maudie and the cat and try to focus on the conversation being made, but it's tiring, and I just want to lay down. My head hurts so bad.
“Ya’ll hear ‘bout the library? It’s the next step in the reconstruction plan, right after finishing the new town hall,” Sae asks. This causes me to pay more attention. A library? We didn’t have one before in 12, besides where we could drop off our books on coal production. What books could they give us?
“A library?” Peeta wonders outloud, and I look at him, trying to seem engaged.
“Yeah, it’s got all kinds of books, you know? The Capitol had a couple of ‘em, but they wouldn’t ever want us District folk learning more than we need,” explains Sae. “They’ve got a small cart set up now, with a couple of loaner books. Nothing official yet, but it might be worth ya’ll’s time.”
I’ll head there tomorrow, I decide. I doubt it's safe enough to have it that far into town, but the thought of going alone is a little unnerving.
“I’ll go tomorrow, then! Maybe they’ll have some cookbooks,” Peeta announces. I want to go with him, but I’ve already asked him to dinner. I know he must want to shut me out of his life, move on. I can’t force myself to be in his life anymore. Not after I tricked him in the Games, was turned against him in his mind, and went crazy on trial in front of the entire nation. No, I can’t do that to him.
But, then again, he’s Peeta. He’s the only person here who knows what I do. He was there with me at the 74th, injured and feverish in that cave. He saved me from Cato and for the sponsors. He was what made me interesting, the only reason anybody paid attention to the runt girl from 12. He kept me sane on the Victory Tour, played along with our act, despite himself, and tried to save me again in the Quell. The pregnancy, the locket, the pearl, calling for me when we got separated at the lightning tree. Even still, in the Capitol, he tried to present me as the confused, pregnant, teenage girl instead of the calculated killer that I really am. He was gone from me while hijacked, but is he gone from me still? Would he have let me touch him, kiss him in those sewers? Would he have relented under my bite after killing Coin if he wasn’t back? Would he have come home?
“Can I come with you?” I surprise myself by asking. His face lights up slightly, and he gives me one of his warm smiles.
“Of course. I can come by for Breakfast and we can leave after that, if you’d like?” Peeta accepts my question and I nod along to his plan.
Friends. We can be friends.