(war takes and changes, but never returns; what once was or could be will never be, and memories are left to become a silent sniper)
.
.
.
the remains of the day
.
.
.
He was
Five years old.
Round faced and beaming, he was excited for his first day of school.
There was a little girl in his class; the same little girl that his father had pointed out to him at that morning's assembly in a whisper that carried the longing of the past. Peeta hadn't understood the significance of the story very much, but he had understood something in himself when that little girl stood up at the teacher's request to sing in front of the other children.
Dark hair in braided pigtails and a faded checkered dress; her little voice rang out as clear as her gray eyes.
There was still a smile on his face when he rushed home; late because he watched the girl walk home hand in hand with a tall, soot-covered miner with matching gray eyes. Just like the girl's, yet not like hers at all.
Katniss.
Peeta liked the way her name sounded as he whispered it to himself, pulling heavy bags of flour off the shelves in his family's bakery.
Katniss. Katniss. Katniss.
He burnt the bread as he daydreamed, and his mother lashed out with a calloused hand that never had and never would have a single gentle bone in it.
His cheek stung with a cruel handprint, but the smile remained long afterward.
He promised to never forget the girl with the song.
He is
Barely sixteen years old.
Everyone likes him, because he is kind, gentle and sweet – the type who draws people in. He's the son of the local and only baker; a title that brings about a certain hierarchy in the shabby district he lived in. His mother is still a domineering and cruel woman, but the town doesn't really know that, and to them, Peeta remains the perfect child with a privileged life. When he isn't baking and under the vicious scrutiny of his mother, he attends school like any other normal teenager.
Except that he's not a normal teenager.
Normal teenagers aren't forced to fight to the death on national television in a cruel game devised by the government. Normal teenagers didn't fall in love with the person they would have to eventually kill. Normal teenagers didn't have to go through the ordeal of two Hunger Games in one lifetime, nor be the victim of brainwashing which almost destroys them.
Normal teenagers did not ever assist in bringing down a corrupt government.
It is anything but a wonderful life, but he's alright and more so because Katniss is with him through it all, and the spaces between his fingers remain warm with hers laced through them.
It is far from a perfect world, but it's good enough for him.
And then it shatters.
He will be
Eighteen.
He'll still kind, gentle and sweet but he will be alone. His family, as unhappy as it was, will be a distant memory buried in the ruins of the bombed district, and he will have no friends. He will have grown too detached from anything and everything. His only interactions will be from the customers that stop by at his small bakery. They will like him from a distance, and pity him from far way. They might want to know his story, but the war has carved out their own, and they'll all be too understanding to ask.
They'll walk away with wistful smiles, and he will not see them go.
He'll live by himself in the upstairs of the bakery, in a sparse room almost as empty as his eyes. When he's not working, he will paint pictures in the darkest of colors; a canvas of muddy hues that run into each other, but he'll give that up in time as well and sink into a monochrome cycle. His life will be a daze of blank faces and empty words; time will pass him by and he won't know where it goes. He won't care either.
Life will have no meaning for him without her.
He will be eighteen, and he will not celebrate his coming of age. There will be no one left to observe the traditional rituals of that day. He will not have finished school, but that's just another thing the war took from him. He will not paint anymore, because there is no point after all that has happened. He has no dreams anymore; a bitter reality will be his only companion.
His nightmares will torment him, and being kind as he is, he will blame himself endlessly for Katniss' death, though it was not his fault. But he will remain the kind of person to feel guilty for things that he did not cause, no matter the victim.
If he had taken the shot from Snow for Katniss; if he had somehow stopped Katniss from volunteering for her sister who died anyway; if he had never seen Katniss on that first day of school…
Because he will still be hopelessly and utterly in love with Katniss the girl with the song-
And the girl who will never sing for him again.
He will think that things cannot get worse.
He will think wrong.
He is almost
Thirty.
He's spent the last ten years wading knee deep in his twenties; the monotonous cycle of passing days, one year dragging after the next.
His smiles are all gone, and what remains is only a mask of politeness that fools no one. His bakery is still running and he's still got many customers; he's making a fair amount of money that he never uses and never will.
His job is routine and even boring, but he juggles it well against the immutable course of his life. It is so tempting to just let everything go and shatter; but because after all this time he's still kind and dutiful and perhaps he always will be he goes on. Besides, the job gives him something to do and keeps him attached to the world by a thin thread.
War carved out holes in his life, and he sometimes he can fool himself into thinking that this bland routine almost fills them.
The fact that it sometimes almost does but not quite makes all the difference in his world.
He did not live in a perfect world when he was young. But from this perspective of the drawn-out years, it seems as if he did. The world he lives in now is empty and dull, without light and purpose or color. He is utterly alone.
And he cannot make himself change.
He should be
Moving on with his life. He should realize that he still has a life to live.
He should know that Katniss would want him to live. He should understand that she, Katniss, is long gone; she's dead, dead, dead, and has been for too many days, weeks, years and no amount of wishing will ever bring her back.
He should learn to smile like he used to, and not cut himself off from the world, because that just makes the struggle so much harder to bear.
He should still paint, because he should still have dreams. He should sleep soundly at night and not spend almost his whole time of rest tossing and turning and reaching across the bed for someone who was never there.
He should even fall in love again, because his heart needs comfort and a companion and perhaps then it would heal.
He should have someone and something to live for everyday and to come home to every night.
The world has been saved and he should want it.
He should be happy.
But he isn't.
He wants to be
Back in his not-quite-perfect but still good-enough-for-him world. He wants Katniss by his side. He wants her warm hand in his as they walk to school together, continuing to go because the Capitol has been defeated and she's survived. He wants to paint pictures again like he used to; he wants to have her flash that rare smile at him and then he wants to paint that portrait of her he always wanted to but never got around to doing.
He wants to hold her tightly in his arms for all those times he didn't; he wants to smile when she tells him to let go, and laugh because he knows she doesn't really mean it.
And he doesn't want people to suffer either. He doesn't want to suffer too. He wants to have everyone happy and well and most of all alive; because those are the things that are most important in life.
But most importantly wants to tell Katniss that he loves her every day and always; that she's threaded through his life like the words of a song.
He wants this to be real.
What he wants is impossible.
He will never be
Everything that he was. Everything that he wanted to be. Everything that he should be.
He's survived.
But he's not living.
He never will.