A/N: Trigger warnings: Eating disorder, PTSD, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts.
She's forgotten what it felt like. Before. So she decides to reacquaint herself.
She begins with hunger.
Skipping meals is difficult now that her mother has returned to life, and Prim watches her every move. She knows they hear her screaming at night when she claws her way out of nightmares. Prim tried to calm her once, but Katniss made her promise never to do it again. The image of her sister remained with her, imprinted on the backs of her eyelids, so when she fell back into her nightmare, Prim came too. For the rest of the night, she watched Prim die a million different ways: torn up by mutts, speared through the chest, swallowed by a swarm of tracker jackers.
Her mother never mentioned the screaming. Just handed her a bottle of sedatives and told her two before bed would help.
After one night under the influence, Katniss shoved the bottle to the back of a dresser drawer. The sedatives lulled her to sleep easily, but they trapped her there. She watched the tributes die again, one by one. Then it was Prim, Gale, her mother, Madge.
Peeta.
She thrashed and screamed until she, too, was devoured by the mutts. Until she was just bloody chunks. Until she was nothing.
She picks at her breakfast under Prim's scrutinizing gaze. She isn't around the house for lunch. At dinner, she waves off Prim's invitation to sit at the table, insisting she ate at the Hob, at Gale's house, in the woods.
The hunger pains never arrive. In desperation, she starts skipping breakfast too. She watches herself grow thinner with a morbid fascination. She wonders why it doesn't hurt, why she doesn't feel the raw, aching pit that used to form in her stomach. She doesn't get the headaches that robbed her of sight and strength, sent her crashing to the wet ground at the base of an apple tree, courting death as she watched a kind boy try to save her.
At night, instead of counting sheep, she counts her ribs, fingers dancing down her torso until the nightmares swallow her whole.
When she collapses one morning in the kitchen, hitting her head on an open drawer, Prim is there to help her up. Prim cleans the wound, and sets a bowl of oatmeal in front of her. Prim stands over her and encourages her to take small, slow bites for over an hour. The last few spoonfuls are cold and slippery, but Katniss forces them down.
She vomits it all back up a few minutes later.
Prim doesn't tell their mother. There's no point. Prim understands that Katniss and Mrs. Everdeen switched places years ago, so Prim decides another role reversal is in order. Every night, she forces Katniss to join them for dinner, and when Katniss insists she is too tired, Prim follows her upstairs with a plate and watches Katniss eat every bite.
It doesn't matter at this point. It didn't work.
Katniss tries the cold next, which is difficult in the middle of the summer, but she remembers the empty hearth and her breath visible in the dark air. She remembers piling blankets, towels, and clothes on her mother and Prim as they shared a bed. She remembers curling her body around Prim's, blue-lipped and stiff-fingered.
But she cannot conjure up the feeling. It's a hazy, colorless memory, stripped of emotion. Like it never happened. Like it was a dream.
She takes ice cold showers, but the cold doesn't penetrate. Her body registers the pain, the water falling like daggers. She jerks and trembles, but it's all instinct. She's too numb to really feel it.
She takes a cold shower in her clothes. Soaking wet, she stumbles to her room and lays on the ground, the fan on full blast.
Prim finds her.
Prim draws a hot bath and forces Katniss to get in, fully dressed. She washes Katniss's hair and massages her shoulders and doesn't cry.
Finally, she says, "Slitting your wrists would be much easier."
And then she does cry, huge gulping sobs as she apologizes over and over for her terrible words.
Guilt tries to permeate the fog that surrounds Katniss, but doesn't quite make it through.
"I'm not trying to die," Katniss says. "I promise."
"You're not trying to live either."
Katniss tries isolation next. The feeling of abandonment used to hurt worse than the hunger pains and the cold. After her father's death, her mother wilted. She stayed in bed for days, slowly losing her petals.
She left them alone.
Katniss had Prim, but as someone to take care of, someone to look after. Someone to love, yes, but not someone who could offer her support.
This has to work. There's only one other option left, but she is afraid.
So far Katniss has ignored the scissors that lay on her mother's dresser, the knives that sleep in a kitchen drawer, the arrows that stand at attention in her quiver, hidden in the woods. But it's getting harder. Her skin is smooth and spotless, screaming for attention. She misses her scars. They were reminders. They told a story of a girl learning to hunt alongside her father, of a girl struggling to survive on her own.
But the Capitol erased those marks, and now she has no evidence of her past in the woods. Just memories that grow more insubstantial the more she recalls them.
She wakes earlier. She comes home later. A plate always waits for her on the table or in the refrigerator, and she eats it out of respect for her sister, even though it's tasteless.
She manages not to see her mother or Prim for an entire week. On the eighth day, she falls asleep in the forest. When she wakes, her last safe place is gone.
As she slept, the woods of District 12 transformed into the woods of the arena, into the woods of violence and dead children and fear.
Panic climbs her body like a vine, tangling her limbs and squeezing her lungs. She falls trying to escape, skins the heels of her hands, and bruises her knee on a rock, but she doesn't yell because they'll hear her. The Careers are still out there. They're hunting her with Peeta's help, and she is all alone.
She remembers it now: abandonment. It's overwhelming. It's painful. It's dirt in the wounds on her hands and no one to help clean it out.
She runs blindly until she makes it to the fence, but even the familiar sight does nothing to quell her panic. Her heart will not slow. Her breathing will not even out. She falls to her knees and vomits into the grass. It's nothing but bile. She hasn't eaten today. She's tired of tasteless food and numb, perfect skin and the nothing nothing nothing that beats within her.
The only time she feels anything anymore is in the midst of a nightmare.
Finally, the panic subsides like a receding wave, but she knows it will return. It always does. Maybe she should be grateful for the nightmares. Maybe she should have swallowed every single sedative. She could have trapped herself inside the arena, lived out the rest of her days running from hidden monsters.
It wouldn't be much different than how she lives now.
She stumbles back to Victors Village and stares up at the house. Her little mansion. The second floor is shrouded in darkness, but the light is on in the kitchen, a spotlight over a covered plate of food waiting to be devoured.
She can't go inside that house, but she can't go home either. Someone else surely lives there now, sleeping in her bed, going hungry in her kitchen.
But she can't remember it. She can't remember the before, and it's tearing her apart. She's supposed to be the lucky one. The victor. She never has to worry about being hungry or cold. Her family is safe, fed, cared for. She never has to suffer again.
But she suffers endlessly.
She is forever on the cusp of a panic attack, pain and guilt looming in the periphery. She is numb otherwise. Empty. She feels nothing but the tension of waiting for her next nightmare.
She looks over at Peeta's home. She hasn't spoken to him in two months, not since they stepped off the train and let their entwined hands drop apart.
His door is locked and the panic returns. She doesn't want to be alone, with her thoughts or with her nightmares. She cannot turn to Prim, cannot put such a burden on her little sister, especially when Prim will never understand.
And Katniss doesn't want her to.
She circles his house until she finds an open window in the back. She slides it up the rest of the way and crawls inside.
His home is dark, quiet, but it smells like the bakery, like cinnamon and fresh bread. She feels the weight of her game bag on her shoulder, squirrels to trade with Mr. Mellark. She knows it's a phantom sensation, but she reaches to adjust the bag anyway. Tears sting her eyes as her hand brushes a naked shoulder.
She creeps up the stairs, careful not to make a noise. The door to what she assumes is Peeta's bedroom is ajar, but when she reaches the entryway, she finds rumpled sheets and an empty bed.
It doesn't occur to her that he is elsewhere in his house, unable to sleep, chased by nightmares that do not cease when he opens his eyes. She only sees the absence of her last hope. Panic chokes her, and she's afraid she might be sick again even though there is nothing left inside her. A strangled sob escapes her throat before she sinks to her knees and cries for the first time since Rue died in her arms.
The hobbled footsteps don't register. Not until his warm hand is on her shoulder does she realize someone is there. She startles, shuffles backwards on her hands like a cornered animal.
"Katniss?"
There is paint on his hands, a streak of red on his cheek. In the dim light of the hall, it looks like blood.
"Katniss, what are you doing here?"
"Does it feel like this for you too?" she asks, but then she is crying too hard to hear his answer.
He helps her into his bed. He pulls the blanket over her, touches the bottom of her disheveled braid, and leaves the room.
She wants to call his name, beg him to come back, but she's starting to slip into unconsciousness. She's cold, she realizes. And hungry. Her entire body aches. She thinks maybe this isn't real. Maybe she isn't real. Maybe she swallowed the nightlock after all, and this is just a temporary hell, a place to pass through on her way to eternal rest.
She jerks awake when he returns with a cup of tea and, of all things, a cheese bun. She sits up, and he holds the tea to her lips. She tries to take it from him but he gently pushes her hand away. It is only now that she realizes how violently she is shaking.
He breaks off small pieces of the cheese bun and feeds her in between sips of tea. When the plate and cup are empty, he tucks her back into bed.
"Don't," she says when he turns to go. She imagines shattering the teacup on the floor, slicing the tender skin of her wrists. She doesn't want to do it, but she's terrified she will. Everything is a weapon. His sheets a noose, the window an exit.
She can't remember ever feeling this lost, this desperate.
"I," she swallows thickly, hesitating over the confession. "I can't be alone."
Without a word, he sits on the bed, removes his prosthetic, and lies beside her. She doesn't hesitate before burrowing into his side, and it's like they're back in the cave, clinging together for warmth. For a moment she feels safe. She tries to tuck the feeling away, so she can remember it later, when he's gone.
"I'm sorry," she says, although she's not sure what exactly she's referring to. There's so much. Too much. "I'm so sorry."
"Me too," he says.
She falls asleep wondering what on earth he has to apologize for.
The next night, the door is unlocked. A cheese bun, still warm, waits on the nightstand table next to an empty bed. Less than five minutes later, he joins her.
The night after, the door is unlocked.
And the next. And the next.
She never has to use the window again.
The nightmares don't stop, but when she wakes, screaming, he holds her close, reminds her where she is, that she is safe. He reminds her what's real.
She used to lay awake in bed beside Prim, heartsick for their father. Dreaming of the past was self-indulgent and useless, but some nights, it was all she had to keep sane. She longed for a sense of security, for light to reappear in her mother's eyes, for more food on the table, for her father's heavy footsteps in the kitchen.
Now she longs for poverty and starvation. No matter how much her old life hurt, she aches for the simplicity of that kind of suffering. It was easy compared to this. At least she could fight it. There were even days where she won.
But she cannot go back. That was the before. She exists only in the after.
The people in town don't understand. They can't. They see her as lucky because she is alive and fed and warm while they suffer. They don't see the ghosts of dead children that shadow her every movement.
She doesn't know how to explain this kind of suffering. But when she's with Peeta, she doesn't have to. Because he feels it too. And every night, he is warm and sturdy, and when she is too tired to fight her own demons, he picks up the sword for her.
They don't speak at all on these nights. She lets herself in. He materializes moments later to wrap her in his arms. And they sleep.
She always wakes before him. Always lets herself out.
But he always welcomes her back.
The crash yanks her out of sleep. She sits up with a start and reaches for Peeta immediately, but the space beside her is empty.
It's dark, but the moon lets in just enough light for her to make out his blonde hair.
He's on the floor.
"Peeta?"
She turns on the lamp and peeks over the edge of the bed.
"Are you okay?" she asks.
She realizes immediately that he isn't. He leans back against the bed, hands covering his face, his shoulders shaking. She sits on the floor in front of him, and gently tugs at his hands.
"You're okay," she says. "It was just a nightmare."
Tears dot his cheeks, stain his shirt. He shakes his head. "It wasn't a nightmare."
"What's wrong?"
"I…" He rubs his forehead and takes a deep breath. "I forgot. About my leg."
She glances down at his pajama bottoms. Usually one pant leg is rolled up, but it's come unraveled. She tries to touch his knee, but he pushes her hand away.
"I just wanted a glass of water. I tried to stand up, and I fell."
"Peeta…" She brushes a few sweaty strands of hair out of his eyes. "I'm so sorry about your leg. It's my fault, and I'm—"
"Don't," he interrupts. "I can't deal with your guilt too. Not with everything else."
She draws away from him, unsure how to react.
"You know you saved my life," he says. "And I know you feel guilty anyway. But you can't put that on me. It makes me feel awful. Do you understand?"
She does. Her guilt may be unnecessary, illogical, but it is a burden she carries. Every time she apologizes is an attempt to shift the weight onto him. She feels better temporarily, but he feels worse.
"Yes," she whispers. "I get it." She stands up and holds out her hand. "Let me help you back into bed, and I'll get you a glass of water."
He frowns up at her. "I can do it myself."
"I know. But you always take care of me. Let me help you for a change."
Without another word, he takes her hand. He leans his other arm against the bed for leverage, and with her help, gets off the ground.
"Be right back," she says.
When she returns, he's sitting up against the headboard. She hands him his water and sits next to him, so they are shoulder to shoulder. She's quiet as he drains the glass and sets it on the nightstand table. As soon as he settles back beside her, she speaks.
"I'm sorry. For lying to you. For hurting you."
"Katniss—"
"I owe you an apology," she says. "I do."
"You kept us alive. There's nothing to apologize for."
"You were so confusing from the beginning." She stares straight ahead, at nothing, the circle of light from the lamp not reaching the rest of the room. "You were so kind, but you were also so good at playing the game. I didn't know if I could trust you. It was supposed to be you or me. I never imagined it could be both."
"I know," he says.
"You've been so far away these past two months, and I know it's my fault, but I want to fix it. I want you around."
"I don't know what that means." He touches her hand. When she doesn't look at him, his fingertips graze her chin. "I don't understand what you want from me."
She has to be honest. She has to try to explain. No matter how bad she is with words, she owes him the truth.
"Everything I did was to save us," she says. "But not everything was just for survival. I don't—I don't know what this is or how I feel. My whole life I've just been trying to keep my family alive. I haven't had time to think about anything else."
He nods and pushes a lock of hair behind her ear. She catches his hand there, leans into his touch.
"But I know I miss you. And I worry about you. All the time. And…" She takes a deep breath. "And I need you."
He cups the other side of her face, and rests his forehead against hers.
"Can that be enough? For now?" she asks.
"For now?"
She hears the confusion in his voice, the hope, but he doesn't press her for a promise.
"For now," she confirms.
She brushes her lips against his, a quick whisper of a kiss. Desire for more unfurls in her stomach, but she is still too confused, too vulnerable to act on any impulse.
He lies back down and pulls her into his arms. She knows when she falls asleep, she will return to the bloodsoaked forest littered with the bodies of dead tributes, but she is unafraid. No matter how terrible her nightmares are, when she wakes beside him, she remembers safety and warmth and happiness.
She remembers the time before the Games, the time before suffering.
And she remembers how to hope for a better after.