Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters mentioned in the following story. They are all property to Suzanne Collins.
Real.
A simple word. So delicate, so sad, so beautiful. It splashed itself across the pages of time, as it passed and carried me along.
With Peeta.
That's how I remember those nights. Buried with screams and misery over a little girl with blond hair and an undone duck tail. She left footsteps in the back of my eyelids, and they burned so mercilessly that I begged for anything else. Even the horrific fireballs that stabbed the ground around me in the arena would be more bearable than watching her dance over a buried grave, and then waking up to imagine my own children do the same to hers.
But there was always someone there, every time. The boy with the bread. The boy with blue eyes, which have seen so much and fell so many times to the thought of holding me. And that was what he did, every night. Peeta and I, trapped inside the tortures of our own minds, but our bodies were whole. We squeezed our eyes shut and grasped our hands, awaiting not only the relief of waking up to a rising sun, but to another night spent and washed away. Together.
That was another word that decorated those months. It was my favorite, and at times, the scariest. This word wasn't ever whispered across a pillow at midnight or sung in the sunrise of another day, but it was always there. It still is.
I don't think I will ever heal. Some wounds just don't, I suppose, and it's only because you don't want them to.
My sister was my wound; everything about her was what made me wake up screaming in the middle of the night. But she was my sister, and I would never forget her. No matter how painfully it burned, I refuse to forget her.
Peeta, though, was the only one who came close to a remedy. Peeta and his words, his paintings, his colors. They gave me hope, and it was more than I could ever have wished for. I watched him paint every day, but during those first few weeks after the war, I was never brave enough to tiptoe behind him and look over his shoulder. But then one day, almost four months since he returned to Twelve, something on his canvas caught my eye from where I was sitting by a windowsill across the room. I wasn't even aware of what I was doing until sat down beside him on the floor, the large canvas leaning against the wall in front of us.
"What's this?" I asked him.
He didn't answer. Well, not then. I suppose that's the way it goes with artists; they are so buried in the depth of their minds that all they are aware of is the colors before them and the brush that creates what their thoughts could not fathom into words.
That night, I sat by the fire and he sat by his finished painting, studying it.
"Skies." His eyes didn't leave the canvas when he spoke. "I'm painting skies."
This was, of course, the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.
"There is no 'skies'," I point out to him. "And the sky isn't red or yellow or black or silver."
"Well, I'm making my own."
Silence fell again, nearly dropped itself around the room by force. I waited inside it, his words echoing across the empty walls. Then I got up and sat down beside him, just like earlier that day.
"Tell me."
And so he did, his finger swirling in the air, pointing out all the details to his skies. And I realized that the painting wasn't just splashes of color. I saw that he painted people, standing and sitting and lying on a ground, faces of those who were gone now, and faces of those who were here.
There was a boy in a woven net and snarky grin, holding out sugar cubes. There was a beautiful girl in a white dress, her fingers outstretched as if there was a piano sitting before her, and she was playing a song in a picture that made no sound. There was a woman with pink hair and orange heels. There was a little dark-skinned girl, standing on her toes and watching a bird - a mockingjay - fly above her. There was a son, a baby boy with eyes the color of the sea in the arms of a smiling woman in a green gown. There was a boy with dark hair and gray eyes, holding out a snare for his little brothers to see. There was an old man holding a glass bottle, filled not with wine but roses, and although I could never imagine that happening in real life, I smiled.
And finally, there was she. Braided hair and exposed duck tail, sitting with her legs crossed and holding a bundle of primroses in her hands.
Peeta pointed to the sky, which was overlapped and layered and splashed with many different colors.
"The skies are them, see," he says. "Each one of them is a color. It's like a memorial, almost. My goodbye painting."
I didn't speak, and so we lapsed back into silence. No words were exchanged again for days, but something had changed. Every day I would sit in front of the painting, not only looking but seeing. I saw his goodbye painting and as I sat there on the floor, I didn't move as the tears rolled down my cheeks and painted the ground beneath me.
A week later, it was him who sat down beside me.
"I could make you one too, if you'd like."
His voice was fairly quiet, but in my head it sounded like a scream. Like someone calling out to me, asking me to come home.
Finally.
I turned to him and smiled.
"Yes. I'd like that."
They hang on the walls by the fire, side by side. After years of catching dust and being wiped clean of it, they've been worn out a great deal, but not so much that it would ruin them.
My children pass by them every day before they go out to play in the Meadow. Every now and then, they would stop and look at them for a while. And sometimes, they would whisper.
"Look there, you see? That's aunt Prim. With the flowers."
"She's really beautiful, isn't she?"
"I bet that lady over there was good at playing piano."
"Which one? Where?"
"The one in the white dress, dummy."
"I wish I knew him. Maybe he'd make a joke or two about having a sweet tooth instead of scolding like mother does."
"You're saying you'd want to eat raw sugar cubes?"
"I'm saying I wish I knew him."
They say that skies are the future of your dreams, your happiness. The people in those paintings were my past and they were my wounds, but I never wanted to forget them.
Peeta created those skies as a reminder that they will never be forgotten and lost. They will remain in our dreams and waking thoughts, and they will stay to color our futures together. All inside the goodbye paintings.
And so we've come to the saddest and happiest word I know. At first, you'd think it means the end of something, but I believe it is a start to a remembrance that fills your mind with memories of smiles and laughs. This word has been spoken many times by many people, and in this story it is an end and a beginning, happy and sad, horrible and wonderful. It has to be said, but that doesn't mean it should be forgotten.
To Prim, Finnick, Rue, Cinna, Boggs, my father, Bonnie, Twill, Messida, Lavinia, Mags, Thresh, Wiress, and everyone who died for the rebellion, for the Hunger Games, for us.
Goodbye.