Three days ago had been the first time since I shot Coin (which was however many days/months/years ago, I don't know for sure) that I had seen Peeta Mellark and simultaneously the last time I would ever see him again.
Until then, I had barely existed, walking the delicate line between life and death. I floated around the house as a living spectre and tried to stuff myself into the nooks and crannies and cobwebs in hopes that I would eventually fade from existence. I was shackled to the structure of that house in Victor's Village, and my soul refused to leave the premises.
Of course, Sae visited nearly every day, but she learned over the months that doing her due diligence to leave food around, make sure I wasn't living in squalor, and not ask questions was both of our best interests. Anything more was a waste of our time. Haymitch showed up every once in a while to make sure I was still alive, sometimes having to peel me out of a closet but those visits were both more than we could mentally process, so we avoided them as much as possible.
The night prior to seeing Peeta, I failed to off myself yet again by taking too many sedatives, and the following morning I awoke to a raging migraine, which was only superseded by the metallic screams of a shovel colliding with the barren soil of District 12.
I shoved myself off the floor, a long string of drool pulling from the wood and connecting a wetness on the whole left side of my face to a large puddle at the foot of the bed. My arms were spindly sticks and they struggled under the small weight of the bag of organs I had become. It wasn't long before I came crashing back to the floor. When I struck the ground, I tasted blood, and my arm flailed, sending the plastic pill bottle flying across the room to collide with the wall. As it bounced to and fro, it sounded like the plastic chuckled at me. If I had the gumption to laugh (not that I necessarily had one to begin with), a single dead bark to signify how pitiful I had become would have escaped me. But I had been silent since my time in exile during the trial.
It had been even longer since I bothered to look in the mirror, so whatever hellbringer dug my grave that morning would have to accept my unwashed, barely-dressed, piss-off state. What ghoulish visage would I present them with on our journey to the underworld? It was only fitting I looked the nightmarish part.
After the third attempt, I managed to get to my feet. It took a while to get my bearings (this must be what Finnick had said about suffering from sea legs), and my head still spun as I spilled down the stairs in long droopy strings of molasses. Upon clutching the cold metal of the doorknob, I realized soon I was to meet my Maker.
I scoffed at the dust. Everything was so damn grayscale.
Surely this wasn't a nightmare—the metal in my hand and the throbbing of my malnourished brain felt so blissfully real, more so than it had in a long time—and the only other thing that could be outside waiting for me was my funeral procession. I knew there was but a single soul out there digging my grave, as a final retribution for all the other children he helped put in the ground. One single soul who was locked in an equally-debilitating prison of alcohol, tied to this dreadful mortal coil with the only other thing we shared in common: the sheer will of our bodies (against that of our souls') to survive. I only hoped that Haymitch had as few words as possible for a proper eulogy.
The air was heady, a sharp rush through my trachea down to my lungs, pumping oxygen-rich blood from my heart to the rest of my limbs, and I felt giddy and alive for the first time: here was my sweet release. Disguised as the clanging of a shovel was the tolling of my death bells. There wasn't a grander sound in the world.
I shoved open the door and stumbled over a basket. Two loaves of bread and a small bouquet of dandelions spilled from a carefully-folded cotton cloth and tumbled along the wood. It was dressed as an offering. My breath hitched in my throat.
There was no way.
The scratching of metal against ground was a constant companion sound to the beating of my heart. I shed all of my hunter tendencies as I stomped across the porch with an image of a perfect rectangle dug for me to dive six feet under, and my facial muscles tried to recreate a look of gratitude to give Haymitch as I laid myself to rest.
But then I stopped, half-dangling off the planks of the porch. My skinny arms hooked around the banister and I clung for a dear life I no longer knew. A life that was no longer precious to me.
I saw his mop of flaxen curls before anything else. They were slightly paler and a great deal shorter than I remembered, but that didn't matter because they still were as vibrant to me as the sun of my yesterdays, and they sprung and coiled over his forehead with his shoveling.
His head bent down in silent prayer to the soil at his feet, tilling it as if there was nothing else in the world that mattered in that moment. Thick muscles, not as thick as before, but still telling of young boy being nourished into a man, corded up his arms and disappeared into the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt. Beads of sweat reflected the sun hanging high in the sky at the corners of his temples, and there was a dusting of dirt along his face and neck. His skin was impossibly red; blooming up his neck and cheeks in patches like it always did when he was nervous or engaged in physical exertion. Two brown handprints dusted above the knees of his heather grey sweatpants; sweatpants that folded into worn leather hiking boots cutting off at midcalf.
Of course, the gloves sat a few feet away, unused because he was always the soul that preferred getting his hands dirty directly. As innate to me as the function to breathe, I was hyper-aware of everything he did, everything he was, right in that moment. My nerves craved him, his touch, his likeness, and I found myself leaning towards him. He was a dream.
And then he turned, hearing my sharp intake of breath, and my reality shattered.
Twin moons of cornflower blue eclipsed my vision, his pupils dilating and constricting as his mind worked to recognize me. He looked puzzled, yet his face was unblemished. There were no scritched borderlines where old skin mapped out space to collide with new skin; no patches of pink and white and gray like those that riddled my face and body. He was new, a perfect cherub of prepubescent manhood. Not the discarded byproduct of war that I was.
"You're back," I breathed, although the sound that came out was like I was crushing two pieces of bark together.
He blinked, and then his eyes slid to the wheelbarrow a few paces away. His body shifted on his knees, a slight enough movement to stand inconspicuously in front of it. Shielding it from me, I realized.
"Can I help you, miss?" He said, his voice curious, yet laced with a strange uncertainty. He sounded sincere out of sheer politeness, and nothing more. His eyes were clouded over with the polite defensiveness he usually reserved for Victory Tours and Capital parties.
"Peeta," I whispered, more to myself than to him.
He frowned, and stuck the garden shovel into the overturned soil. He was offended that my name fell from his lips. His muscles were tense. His body was dangling on the fine line between fight and flight, and he regarded me like one alone in the woods weaponless would a rabid animal.
That rabid animal was me.
"Are you looking for something around here, ma'am?" Again, with the honest sincerity that would have crippled my heart if it hadn't already stopped beating long ago.
I just stood there, breathing very slow, nearly dead. He blinked, unsure of how to react to my unresponsiveness.
I wasn't sure what floored me more—his complete inability to recognize me, or what I might have looked like to him—a starved polecat, half-strangled and drug through a muddy alleyway, only to be left in a bag for two weeks with no nourishment save the puddle it slowly drowned in.
I cleared my throat, stood a little straighter. The yellow petals peeking from the edge of the wheelbarrow winked at me in the sunlight.
"What're those?" I forced out with a cough.
He wiped his hands on his pants and stood up. He drew an arm across his brow and stared at me. His expression was calculating, his gaze flicking from me, to the partially-toiled ground, and the wheelbarrow, and then back to me.
"They're for her," he said, quieter this time, and stared at the ground. I hadn't been around people enough lately to read his expression.
"For who?" I grunted.
"For the little girl who saved my life in the Games," he said. "She died so I could live. Her name was Primrose, and I thought she'd like these," he said. Her name from his lips was so eloquent, and there wasn't the slightest hint of embarrassed discretion everyone else had when saying her name in front of me. As if he didn't know what she was to me? How it crushed my soul into smithereens each day I survived in this spectral house without her. Without him.
He gestured to the wheelbarrow with a flick of his wrist. His voice still had its lilting quality, well-spoken with the Townie accent barely present. But a new rich baritone sound sparked a hunger for life in me I couldn't explain. How long had it been since I've heard his voice?
That spark was snuffed by his next words.
"Who are you?" He said. He blinked, once, twice, and his long blonde lashes stuck to themselves. Inwardly, I found myself longing for them to kiss the curve of my shoulder. Outwardly, I just crouched there, speechless. I was jittery, and my body was scrunched between two skinny frog legs like a wild repulsive thing with long stringy hair matting into dreadlocks and capillaried eyes deep in dark sockets that stretched over a drawn face.
"If you're a squatter, it's time you got out of here. Let's respect the memory of the family who lived here. There are plenty of other houses in the District to set up camp. Better yet, a soup kitchen is opening up in the next couple of days with the Ceremony, I'm sure you could find help there." He gripped the larger shovel in both hands, leaving the head stuck in the ground, but making a big enough gesture for me to know he meant business.
I patted at the matted mess that was my hair over and over again in the same spot, and swiveled my neck around, wildly trying to grasp at any one thing that I could to make sense of what was happening to me. I blinked rapidly, to stave off the tears, or because I had suddenly become blind and couldn't see anything for the roaring in my head, I didn't know. I was a horse spooked by a snake, and I reared back from the porch beam.
He gave me a tentative smile. "Go on now, let's go upstairs and collect your things, I'll walk you into town. I won't tell anyone you've been in Victor's Village, Miss... I didn't catch your name," he said, his words the warmest they had been up to this point. If it wasn't so emotionally crippling for me, I would have remembered that I loved the sound of his smile.
He could sense my unraveling as an insane homeless creature on the brink of death, and of course, it was only in his innately pure character to want to help me. He dropped the shovel, his mouth pulling into a slow so-warm-it-was-patronizing smile. He crept toward me, slow and deliberate with his knees bent, arms outstretched, almost for a hug. Like he was creeping up to catch a lizard. He wanted to capture me and put me in a cage like the rest of them.
My vision was blurred, and my body reeled, but my hunter feet, slaves of security in routine, knew where to go. I scrambled across the porch, tripping over the uneven boards and flung myself inside. I slammed the door and locked it. The sound of the metal sliding into place calmed my nerves a smidgeon. I could vaguely hear him yelling something and pounding on the door, but I moved like a tornado up the stairs and into all the rooms, ripping them apart, slamming open windows, doing anything I could to remind me that this hellish reality was my punishment.
Out the window went that infernal vase, the face of its single perfect white rose leering up at me, the last relic of Snow's pale and sheltered countenance, as it fell to the ground outside with a crash. A fit of ragged breaths ripped through me, and no amount of oxygen sucked into my lungs made it feel any less like drowning in sand.
I vaguely heard Haymitch bark Peeta's name somewhere outside, but that world was far below me now.
I gripped the walls, sliding my palms along the peeling wallpaper and cracked paint. The house was experiencing my same descent into decay and madness. I fumbled around like a drunken stoat in and out of rooms and closets, searching for the soft supple leather of my father's hunting jacket and my bow. I cradled these sacred treasures to my chest, and stuffed myself into damp darkness of a locked closet. I closed myself in, making sure all three walls stood at my back and against the bones of my arms, and met oblivion.