Chapter 1
I've gone crazy, couldn't you tell.
I threw stones at the stars but the whole sky fell.
-Gregory Alan Isakov, The Stable Song
The meadow had stood around me, silent, unchanging, illusory, until I forgot that the world outside the meadow had shattered. The same stalks of long grasses, permanent borders of thick pines, and spattering of wildflowers uninterrupted by the passage of time. They were the the greens of my youth, of Prim being at home with Buttercup and my mother, with Gale in the woods, against the boulder, sunshine on our cheekbones. I stood there and closed my eyes, breathing in the perfume of the meadow. It was the smell of sun-baked straw with the undercurrent of verdant moss and windswept pollen.
"We could do it, you know."
"What?"
"Leave the district. Run off. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it."
Gale. His name felt heavy, cold, and metallic in my mouth. Gale, hanging from the collapsing frame of the Capitol, looking at me, pleading. Shoot me. Shoot me.
Gale killed Prim.
"Gale killed Prim" I whispered, my knees folding. I knelt on the ground, the tears streaming unabashedly down my face, my body heaving as I whispered and as the whisper grew to a scream. "Gale killed Prim, Gale, Gale, Gale killed Prim. Gale killed Prim. Prim is dead. And Gale, Gale, Gale did it. Gale killed Prim. He killed her," I repeated, my chest rising and falling and my ribs giving and taking like they were humans: selfish and hungry for the taste of air.
I let out a wail. It rippled through the trees, shaking violently all the boughs that Gale and I had shot squirrels from. Squirrels that had been baked and broiled, dressed and served to Peeta on his childhood table. It ripped through the leaves, tore the cell walls until the syrupy water of their insides, the serum that Rue had rubbed along my burns, leaked on the forest floor. I howled in the middle of the Meadow until my lungs felt permanently interlocked with my ribs.
I melted to the ground, clutching my chest and gasping.
There was the loud cracking of young leaves and fronds from the forest behind me. It was lost in the rollicking waves of noise that poured endlessly from my insides. All I noticed was the two tanned arms that snaked their way around my waist. "Katniss, Katniss, shh, it's all okay," Peeta whispered. "I'm here now, I'm here, nothing can hurt you anymore."
I collapsed into his arms, my body softening like putty in his hands. He pushed my hair back, cupped my face in his hands, and pushed the tears from my cheekbones with a gentle flick of his thumb. "Peeta," I hiccupped, "why does it feel like every step forward is followed by a stumble back?"
He leaned his arms back, resting his palms on the warm ground. I fell into the space between his legs and leaned my torso into his as if we were two parallel lines, bent out of shape by a hammer dropped from careful hands.
We had lived together in District 12 for almost a year now, coaching each other through the mental breaks that fanned from the civil war we had endured and the changed shape of our lives. I had held Peeta's wrists to the wall as he screamed in my face, hurling insults placed on his tongue by the rose-scented dictator that had tortured both of us. He had sat at end of my bed, running his hands over my calf as I stared blankly at the wall for days at a time. He said nothing, just rubbed the atrophied length of my leg, staring at the oily sheets of hair that covered my face.
There were nights where it felt that we might achieve a new normal. We laughed over plates of dandelion greens and rabbit meat, our mouths glistening with the oils of the food. The laughter was tinny and hollow, but as time wore on it gained weight and body in our throats. We remembered what it was like to feel almost complete and the searing pain that lived in dark, singed coils in the backs of our brains dulled.
But the screams that we both had heard and dealt out still rang in my ears. Nights when I would wake up, sweating and alone in my bed to hear Peeta's screams coming from the room down the hall. We had given up on living separately, his house sitting empty with shattered furniture and torn wallpaper after a night when he remembered details of his torture, my torture, our mutual torture at the hands of the government. I walked in, braless and hair rumpled, to find him curled up in the corner, shaking and panting. "Peeta, what happened?"
"Katniss," he croaked. I sat next to him and stroked his hair. His body was cold and sweat-drenched, his eyes were bloodshot. "Katniss, I can't sleep. My dreams... nightmares..." he managed.
"I know," I said. I did know. My own dreams had been spoiled by the image of Prim's braided hair, of Gale, Snow, Coin, of Prim getting further and further from me as I screamed to her. "I can't sleep either," I said.
He wrapped his arms around my waist, and I slid slowly to the floor alongside him. Our bodies were coated in a slip of perspiration and we slept, as chaste as children, for the first time in months on that hardwood floor.
Those were steps forward, Peeta moving into my house, us rebuilding the gaps between the Capitol and each other. Now, I had jumped backwards, stumbling into the meadow, tripping over Gale's boulder.
"It's okay if we fall back sometimes," Peeta said, running his hands through my hair. "Maybe we can fall so far back that we undo everything has been done to us."
I thought back to before the 74th Hunger Games, before Haymitch, before Effie, before the letters inside the glass ball had been strung together to form Primrose Everdeen. "That can't happen," I said.
I saw his eyes cloud over. I couldn't see the images of the 74th Games that scrolled through the projections of his mind. Images of the two of us, kissing in the riverbanks, sleeping curled together like seahorses.
Peeta slid his legs back and stood up. I turned around, feeling small and unprotected. "Peeta?" I called quietly.
He shoved his hands in his pockets. "I'm going to head home," he said.
"Wait, Peeta, I'll follow you back."
The two of us walked back to the Victor's Village, him twenty paces ahead and I silently behind. The meadow may not have changed, but for me the changes had become reality, and as I watched Peeta's wordless back disappearing over the ridge I understood that these changes couldn't be reversed as easily as my footprints in the wildflowers.