Ravished by Dead Words
Certain words fall off their vocabulary.
They stop saying them for various reasons, sometimes out of fear that hides in shadows, others because they reach a point when saying them ruins something, and they've had their fair share of disaster in the world. Either way, the words fall off their lives like marbles, they make no sound on their way down; they don't put up a fight, they see their demise and embrace it feeling the wind of their indifference as they touch the ground.
As for the Katniss and Peeta, they don't feel bad about the word's deaths. Words are weapons, swords; they deserve the fate they get.
It's only fitting. So many humans have died; some parts of a language must die too.
one.
mockingjay
They become the birds.
She goes to the woods when she hunts and she still hears them sing, still feels the notes vibrate strong enough to taste them, smell them, slap them on her scars as they look down on her from the trees. The notes always sound like a reproach to her you're not one of us, you never were.
But the thing is that she always knew she wasn't. She was a girl on fire, but she never felt she stood for what the birds meant. The birds told ruthless stories about rebellion and surviving, and making the Capitol seethe with rage. Those purposes didn't hold her interest, Katniss' only sin was her desire to live. But the circumstances danced around her and pushed, pushed and pushed until they put feathers on her back and a mission pressed on her shoulders like a hand, when all she ever wanted was to be a sister.
She tries to whistle back to them, I know, I wasn't. I never really had your wings.
Every time she whistles, the birds fall silent, the woods' heart stops pumping and nature itself bows its head in shame. People all over the country address her like she's a celebrity, the revolutionary symbol, Mockingjay they call her but she winces every time in pain. She's ashamed because she burned and never sung, and her wings were clipped before she even soared.
Being a symbol crushes and dispels like feet stomp on broken twigs on a forest bed. And even though her mind understands she was never wired for it, that the one kid who was suited for the job of genuinely moving masses of people was the blonde man that lives with her, she doesn't know why it stings that she was weighed and measured, and was found lacking.
The birds continue to look down on her.
She gets up, and leaves and with each step she feels the corner of her eyes twitch downward, and a too familiar lump clogging her throat. But the tears don't come because they have dried up from within her, and she leaves the woods so that the birds can sing in peace.
When she comes back home, Peeta sees the shape her shoulders make and he only asks "the birds?" and then she nods.
She can't bring herself to say their name, and he learns not to out of respect.
two.
attack
Blackout takes its place, both as noun and verb.
It takes them a while to eradicate this one, because it seems to never fade. It constantly tries to make its way back into their lives whenever his shoulders tense and his back arches like a wire on a bow about to strike. It threatens to break free in his knuckles and it makes his pupils thin like stars on the nights they remember how to shine.
Once or twice, he falters. The word seizes him, controls him. It makes him punch the walls and charge; without reason, on instinct, animalistic. He charges like bullets clicking into place in the barrel of a gun.
He is always the bullet. He wonders when the horrors of lives past will stop pulling the trigger.
He feels it before it takes him over, and though it takes him a while, he learns how to say one word before the monsters take over him completely.
Run
When he comes to, the first thing he feels is outlandish hatred, seeping into his bones and outwards like an invisible shield that he can't bend. Hatred that comes out of his pores in liquid sweat, sticky sweat he feels running down his spine, disgusting, visceral. He hates, hates with a passion, hates himself when his eyes roam her frame and he sees the faint lines of a purple and green patchwork of his own work coloring her skin. Old and new wounds alike mapping her body as if her own scars are not enough. He hates that once, a long time ago, he wanted to make her body a canvas, paint secret words and new landscape on her skin, but all he does now is inflict more pain and brand her body with the bruises he feels inside himself.
The second thing he feels is nausea, because her gray eyes always stay.
There's a loud ringing in his ears, that prevents him from standing too fast, and his vision clears enough to trace the features on her face, the worry in her eyes as she considers him; and the anger and his hatred pushes out of him in torrents flowing down his back, down his neck. It won't be long before it corrodes his whole body.
He starts shaking, and she grips his wrist in her hands like she always does when one of the episodes is about to start. But there's no way she can know that his shaking has, for once, nothing to do with the horrors implanted in his brain.
I attacked you. It's the last time he says the word. He tries to talk once more, but she shushes him, places a finger on his lips and he feels the pulse there. The sticky line of hatred continues coming out of his skin.
Don't. You blacked out. It's the first time the term takes over. She makes a gesture towards the back of his head, as if to touch his hair and he's horrified. Where does she find the strength to keep touching this beast? Why does she put herself in this position?
I… knocked you out. She speaks the words as if she's surprised by them, but her face is blank as she retrieves her hand and it comes out drenched in blood.
He can see his hatred materialize in the blood that pours out, and her body carries the bruises he feels the Capitol left inside him, and from there on he never attacks her, not really.
He blacks out and she fights the monsters that take him over at night.
three.
catnip
It dies without a proper funeral. Nothing ever takes its place.
Sometimes when she's out hunting she sees the flower, convinces herself that it's mint if she squints her eyes appropriately. But her father taught her the differences between plants; she's been surviving on them for such a long time and the foliage of a mint herb is not as gray. Try as she might, she can't fool herself.
She has never been good at pretending.
Every time she sees the plant and the house is alone, she tries to grab the phone and give him a call. She steels herself, covers herself in heavy iron armor and her footsteps fall loudly on the floor towards the phone in the wall. She grabs it, takes a deep breath and imagines what she's going to say.
She only murmurs his name into the receiver, over and over again.
Gale. Gale. Gale. Gale.
She never calls, though. Peeta always comes home early, or Haymitch needs help with the geese. It takes her years to practice saying his name without breaking apart, and every time she thinks he's fading, every time she thinks her memories of him puncture her lungs, or sour her tongue she repeats it in the back of her head like a prayer.
She never says or hears the word 'catnip' again, but she won't allow his name to disappear from her life even if he is lost from her world.
Four.
war
It fades of its own accord, and cleanly cuts time in uneven and cracked segments known as before and after.
No one talks about the middle. Who wants to relive that misery?
It's not until decades later, when their kids reach the age of recognition that the toddlers speak the word detached. It takes a new generation of children born in freedom to call that time by the name it deserved. Katniss winces when the girl comes home with a text reciting things learned at school and Peeta's eyes watch the horizon when the girl asks if they were part of that war. The kids don't notice, they don't know any better. They are sufficiently separated from it to talk about it like it happened to strangers and not their mom and dad.
For Peeta and Katniss, on the rare occasions when they speak about their beginnings, and the need in each other's soul becomes too much to bear, and words, nightmares and strange echoes of light come tumbling out of their mouth, they don't speak about before or after. They speak about back then.
Back then when there were dandelions, back then when there was a fence. Back then when there was burned bread and a Seam and more than ashes on the street. Back then when their lives were so far apart they seemed from above like parallel lines never meant to touch; lines so destined to be apart that it took a horrific set of games to force them to follow the same track.
No one talks about the middle. No one wants to play that game.
five.
love.
Love blows up and it's set on fire with Prim's flesh. Love moves down to District 2 with a soldier and a uniform. Love is suffocated by trackerjacker venom, and a baker's family that no one mourned.
Love is damaged, and bruised, mangled and lacking limbs and the ability to stand on its feet.
In its place, there's a nameless feeling. A sort of glue that pieces together the remaining patches of their flesh that haven't been scarred and that makes her lick the slope of his neck, the length of his chest and the thin layers of sweat that pool at his navel. It's a feeling that resembles morning dew in texture; it's watery and inconsistently cold but it makes him squeeze her breasts and coax strangled moans out of her mouth late at night. It's a feeling that takes over whenever he grabs the first brush in months and paints an orange sunset and she watches; the cold invisible hand that swats at her face like a slap every time she wakes up from a nightmare and he's not there at her side. The feeling is redundant and swelling and sometimes she fears it won't leave enough space in her insides for her organs to function. This feeling that she thinks and fears is going to kill her.
It's a need in his hands to make her breakfast every morning even though he can tell which days she will stay in bed and not eat a thing. It's the ache in his abdomen every time there's no light in her eyes and her jaw is set like a flat cake with not enough leaven to make it grow. It's an itch to fix and be fixed; and rescue while being saved when all he wants to do is fuck her. Take her, and fill her body with the pieces of himself he can't make sense of, but he knows she's too bruised to fix anyone but herself.
It's a silent agreement. His body gives her the questions she can't answer, and she counts on his hunger and confusion to complete her.
The feeling transforms and morphs as time goes by, but it's never what it was before. It's an understanding and inevitability and a lack of choice, that even if they had the opportunity and their free will, they would still choose.
It's a contradiction, their substitute for love. It's a language of its own that tastes like a promised "always" and a "real" that was faked so much it turned to truth.
Always.
Real
Those are the words that take love's place before it dies, and it's not ideal, but it's close enough.
Author's Note: I wrote here in FF such a long time ago. A lot of things have changed. Title comes from a quote by D. H. Lawrence. I hope you enjoyed this.