All at once, I find myself wondering why Portia and her team agreed to do it.
I'm thinking back to the interviews I saw on TV, when Peeta was a prisoner in the Capitol. The interviews between Peeta and Caesar Flickerman. The ones where, in the first one, he was fine... but then days later, they aired the interviews from after he'd been tortured for weeks.
And in all of those interviews, I'm suddenly remembering, Peeta was perfectly made up and styled. His hair done. His clothes perfect. Everything about him, as clean and neat and put together and fashionable as an expert stylist and her team could make him.
Even in the interviews from after he'd been tortured, and when he was absolutely going to be tortured again.
So why did they do it? I know it must have been Portia and her team who got him ready for those interviews. Portia must even have designed new clothes for him to wear, after he'd lost so much weight.
What could possibly have made them agree to prep and style and make him up, when he was being tortured? I know they cared about him. They wouldn't have wanted to cooperate with anything that had to do with hurting him.
It wasn't any threat to them that made them do it. That's for sure. They wouldn't have agreed out of fear for themselves.
I don't think it was a threat to Peeta, either. What could Snow have threatened him with that he wasn't already facing?
No...
It was the chance for Peeta to be touched by loving hands.
They did it to give him that. To give him his chance to spend at least a few minutes, an hour or two, feeling something other than pain. To feel someone caring for him. Tending to him. Being gentle with him.
It's the same thing Cinna would have done for me, even though it would have broken his heart. If I was being tortured. If there was nothing else in the world he could do.
In fact...
It's exactly what he did for me before the Games.
I was being tortured then, even though it was in a different way. I was being forced to go through agony and terror, and threatened with worse and more of it to come. I was in very serious danger of dying. The second time, the Quarter Quell, it was almost certain I would die.
And Cinna stood by me every moment he could. Quietly doing his job. Fixing my hair. Designing my clothes. Talking to me. Trying to comfort me. Just being there, when there was nothing else in the world he could do.
Telling me he believed in me.
Holding my hands.
Knowing all the time that I was being sent, or in the Quarter Quell, sent back, to pain and probably to my death.
Cinna... I think, suddenly heartbroken. I had no idea until this minute how much that hurt you.
It must have hurt Peeta's stylist and her team just as much.
And wouldn't I have done the same thing for Peeta myself? If I'd been there, in his team's place? If there was nothing else in the world I could do?
Brushed his hair? Cleaned his face? Whispered to him, or told him with my hands if I couldn't say it aloud, that there was still someone who cared about him?
Even though it would have broken my heart.