Disclaimer: The Hunger Games series does not belong to me.
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"You love me. Real or not real?"
"Real."
They bask in dreams of old District 12 – when his mother would hit his head and make him feel worthless, when her father died and left her to feed their family, when all was still too well. They revel in the days that the nightmares choose to pause – when the mutts vanish before she would wake up thrashing, when he would wake her just in time before she screams. These are the good days. For him, anyway.
The bad ones are when he wakes up to see her side of the bed empty. These are the days she leaves before daybreak, clutching her bow and arrow and intent to hunt. To kill. He would picture her with a resolved look on her face, walls built up too high around her again. The bad days are when she refuses to utter a word and he is left to battle thoughts of tracker jacker venom and doubts for her being.
But they carry on and then there are wonderful days.
She laughs a little at the mess he made at the kitchen while baking cheesebread and he retaliates by wiping flour on her face. He brings up Finnick Odair once in conversation and she doesn't stay quiet, adding in a few details about him instead (the color of his irises present on the eyes of the child in Annie's arms). They walk in the budding town and refuse to acknowledge the old days… until she pets a limping goat being sold in the new market, an unreadable smile on her lips.
These are times he can't help but think her beautiful.
Because she remembers.
And that's all he wants to do, too.
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And yet, love, too gentle are your screams; too piercing are your whispers.
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The little girl's red plaid dress was what caught his eye in the first place. It was the same colour as the cupcake his older brother had given him for his fifth birthday and was his favourite colour back then, and so he kept staring. The children were in line with their parents as they signed up for the beginning of school and the atmosphere was not too comforting for the boy, so he used the sight of her dress as a distraction.
His father smiled as he pointed at her. "See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother but she ran off with a coal miner."
"A coal miner? Why did she want a coal miner if she could've had you?" It just didn't make any sense in his five-year-old mind. Since the beginning, they were told of tales from the Seam and how more fortunate the people in their side of town were compared to the miners. And his playmates never thought to befriend children from there, but he wondered. Even then, he always wondered.
"Because when he sings . . . even the birds stop to listen."
It only took thirty seconds of that conversation for her to become an enigma to him. For the rest of the day, he couldn't keep his eyes off her red plaid dress and the few times he did, he stared at her braids instead. He found nothing special with the girl, but the words of his father rang in his ear every now and then. So later in music assembly, when Ms. Acker asks them who knew the valley song and her hand immediately went up, he had to wonder if the birds would stop to listen to her too.
And they did. Oh, how they did.
The silence among the schoolchildren was palpable and he knew they were in awe, just as he was. But he didn't think her beautiful, not just yet. Not until everyone was focused on the next singer in front of the class and she returned to her seat with her eyes cast downward and a sheepish smile on her face.
She didn't know the effect she had on everyone. That's what made her beautiful.
That's what made her remarkable.
And that's what made him a goner.
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Fairytales begin with "once upon a time" but first, fate sang that same line to our tragedy.
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"Because... because she came here with me."
Too fast.
The words left his tongue a little too fast.
Then everything followed at the same pace, making his head spin.
His palm bled and bled and he gritted his teeth to avoid indulging in the pain, but the fact that she thought everything was a ruse made him hurt differently. She accused him of making her look weak but Haymitch retorted that he made her desirable, but all he could think of was the angle they were going to promulgate now. Everything was real for him. Everything would look real in the audience's eyes. But the one person he only wanted to know wasn't quite certain.
And later, but not much later, her lips would capture his after every spoonful of soup that he swallows. Her body would be pressed against his own as they wait in the cave for morning to come. Hope was upon them as the change of rules in the 74th Hunger Games was announced, but all he could think of was the hope that he could have her. Everything was real for the audience. Everything she did felt too real. But he himself wasn't sure now. Oh, the irony of the world.
"The earlier revision has been revoked. Closer examination of the rule book has disclosed that only one winner may be allowed."
Too dense.
His head was too dense for the rest of the words to make substance of themselves.
Then everything that followed made absolutely no sense.
Because her arrow was a centimeter away from his chest, her entity and his heart separated only by a layer of cloth, skin and bone. He almost smiled as he forced her to do it and threatened to do it himself because it would not have been worthless, it would not have been in vain, but suddenly, surprising him yet again, she was on her knees. Desperately begging for him not to carry on. Could the past minute and the current ticks of the clock both be real? She was all set to kill him but in the blink of an eye, she's pleading for him not to die. And yet despite the cataclysm right then that swallowed them whole, he promised he could see the sincerity in her face as she whispered, "You're not leaving me here alone."
He wouldn't have. Not after then.
And later, ostensibly eons later, he kept up on that thought as Finnick Odair restarted his breathing. She was laughing and crying at the same time and he felt right then and there that he was the luckiest man in Panem, despite being inches from death. Was it real? He knew her not to be that good an actress to declare to himself otherwise. And did it matter, anyway? The furious look on her face as she screamed, "You were dead! Your heart stopped!", made the imminent rebellion, the Quarter Quell and everything else insignificant for a second.
Because she looked too pretty when she was enraged.
And despite the fact that he would forever stand in the interim between what's real for her and what wasn't, there also existed a fact that she would forever remain an enigma. He never saw her through Panem's eyes but it is in the spectrum between those two mysteries that he found her most beautiful. He would never have her, not completely, but that's what made him ache for her ultimately.
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Had they foretold your myth back then, I never would have been a footnote, much less your sweetest paramour.
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He woke up not wanting to. He woke up with the gut feeling that he wasn't where she was. And the stark white walls of the room in the Capitol (it took him less than a minute to discern that) made him want to return to oblivion. Because he knew what would follow this. They would kill him, and these times he knew better than to fear it, but the rebellion was ignited and Katniss was nowhere near him and it all blurred into an uncanny labyrinth in his head and – he passed out not wanting to.
The people in white masks showed him her footage, running along that forsaken hospital and shouting, "If we burn, you burn with us!", running along the destroyed lands, running along the fires of this nation. And then the man with the rose scent himself came to see the boy with the bread. His words were persuasive and they strived to sway him into speaking in front of Panem. But persuasion doesn't always have its charm and President Snow outright told him instead, "You're going to convince them to stop it. Call a ceasefire."
He refused. And refused. Even when the electricity enveloped his entirety and the water felt too cruel on his skin, he just shook his head. Even when Johanna Mason taunted him to succumb to Snow's request, he denied them his voice. No. He said no, up until they threatened to kill everyone in District 13 including the girl on fire. Viciously. In ways he could and should never imagine. And so he became the Capitol's puppet. Saying their every word upon instruction with all the dedication he could muster.
But the torment remained steadfast. They fed him, yes, enough to sustain his health but the continuing torture contradicted that. And at night it would get worse with Johanna's husky comments, "You know she's not going to rescue you anytime soon. Or maybe at all. Stop dreaming, lover boy." And he almost added, but ultimately didn't, There's no one left to save us but ourselves.
He always kept his eyes open until sleep took pity on him. Most of his time was spent agonizing over his cellmate's horrific laugh and stream of taunts, the rest spent hating himself for letting Johanna get through to him.
And then… And then it was the girl on fire's beauty that kept him alive. The thought of it fooling him from the beginning became unbearable, more unbearable than the electric shocks enveloping his body, even. More unbearable than the searing liquid they inject into his veins. More unbearable than the hallucinations themselves. He didn't know why but he suddenly saw that she was too beautiful and that's what's destroying him.
He couldn't live without her, but as the Capitol officers showed him the tapes from District 13, he realized he would have to. Because she was always too fine without him. The first thought that entered his head when he woke up was that he'd want to see her just to prove he could still breathe despite her not being by his side.
Slowly, ever so slowly, her beauty remained but the rest of her faded.
Then he went insane.
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Our every touch and kiss sealed their demise but it's their demise that catechized our kisses.
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There are times he can't help but think her beautiful.
Because she remembers.
And that's all he wants to do, too.
He doesn't want to recall the voices in his head that were fractured eternally by the hallucinations, nor the moments retold to him by other people. He wants to remember who she was in his eyes in the moments when she writes an old anecdote about Prim or when she solemnly views his new paintings. There are the good days, the bad days, the wonderful and the outright bloodcurdling, but he finds himself wishing only to remember.
Sometimes, he would hear her melodious voice and the birds – whatever was left of them in this derelict place – would fall silent. Those times were rare. As rare as the instances he finds himself the same again.
But then Haymitch visits them (at the very least half-sober) and they talk of his frustrating geese. She decides to go hunting and returns home instead with a bag of flour and an indifferent shrug when he asks. They take late night walks through town – now filled with different plantations – and reprimand the very, very few children they catch still playing. And later, though not much later, she takes him to the Meadow. And not too long after that, she kisses him while they are lying down on the grass that turned green again.
Now he knows. He knows that she remembers but he doesn't always have to try and do the same. He can discover her in a new light.
Because there will be good times. Better times, perhaps.
These are times he won't help himself from thinking her beautiful (in so many novel ways).
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Author's Note: I wrote this on a whim so I'm sorry if the characterisations were slightly off.