CHAPTER 1: Fire
"Peeta.."
"Yes?"
"How long are you going to love me?"
He gets up of the floor, leaving his book behind, and make his way to her bed. She narrows her eyes at him, trying her best to focus on his answer and not drift into sleep.
The bed feels warmer the second he slips inside her blanket too.
"I will love you -" He pauses to place a soft kiss on the crook of her neck. "Until the very end of me".
Katniss smile against her pillow, determinated to win this how-long game. "Ask me, then".
"How long are you going to love me?"
"Forever"
He chuckles. "You can't promise that"
"Yes, I do". She turns around and bury her face in his chest. "We will stay here forever".
"Like this?"
"Uh-hum" And she does. She doesn't want to get up ever again, with her face buried in his chest and his head on the crook of her neck. Just the perfect way to be.
"Okay".
His lips touch her temple softly, and she slowly give up on her heavy eyelids. Sleep is so much easier that way.
When she wakes up, he isn't there. He has never been there, she realizes. Her mind is playing tricks on her again, as usual.
There's no Peeta on her bed, there's no Peeta anywhere close to her enough.
Her hair is braided, but she's not leaving the house. It has been days since she last hunted or even eated. Despite Greasy Sae efforts to put food into her mouth, she will pretend to do it and then throw up later. In her mind, this is a great punishment. It would be easier to die this way, at least it won't hurt much.
Everyday she faces that knife, hidden inside the nightstand right next to her bed. It calls her, scream her name.
She doesn't dare to touch it. Not quite yet. Only if everything else fails.
The truth is, she is afraid. She fears death, even after all the ones she faced. Blood and screamings and pain scare her, and she wants to be carried away into darkness, simply like that - as falling asleep with Peeta.
Oh, if Peeta was here.
He would comfort her. He would make this wishes go away, even if briefly. His warm arms would make her feel safe. The Peeta she knew would make her life colorful again, out of this gray illusion.
But the Peeta she knew is no longer him.
The Peeta she loved rests deep in a soul she no longer recognize. He is now a shell, a shell of someone who loved her.
A shell of someone she loved.
Not anymore.
In fact, everyone whose Katniss's heart belonged to are long gone. That is, everyone she loved somehow disappeared. Something tells her they are just waiting for her to join them. The darkness where Prim rests. Where Cinna, and Madge, and her dad rests.
The darkness that her Peeta rests, the true Peeta. Not the false one.
And there is this part of her, too small to be noticed, that wants to belive she can bring out at least of them. There is still hope for him. If I could only reach him.
She puts her socks on, her feet freezing, and drags herself to the toilet. The mirror is half broken, as she threw a boot on it once for showing her face when she didn't want to. The cold water from the sink doesn't help.
When she sneezes, everything on her hurts. Her back isn't the same anymore, even if her ID shows only nineteen years old.
Her attempts to laugh about the irony of feeling old at nineteen only makes her back hurt more.
I could use Peeta's back massage now.
And it saddens her that she can't.
She goes back to bed.
Days passes, then weeks. Months.
It's spring. Katniss looks through her bedroom window to her dead garden.
Even the flowers gave up.
Haymitch's garden looks better than mine, and they are probably soaked in some kind of alcohol.
She makes her best to put on some trousers and leave her bedroom. The stairs look a lot more longer than they were last time she got downstairs, and the floor feels weird.
Just like when you spend your whole day on high heels and finally put your bare feet on the ground.
Ha. Like if I have been using anything but my socks these days.
Her house is pretty clean, so she concludes this is Greasy Sae work too. Clean, but empty. There is too much space for her alone here.
She sighs. Too much space for me to be alone at all.
When she opens the door, the light almost get her blind. God, since when the sun brighted that much? It annoys and thrills her at the same time.
Katniss sits on the sun, on a bench she had forgotten her house had. It feels warm, quite good.
She close her eyes shut and tilt her head back, letting the sunshines flow through her, and the corner of her lips lift only a little, in almost imperceptable smile.
Because it's no longer winter.
Her memories of sunny days come back, one by one. The time her dad took her to swim in the lake and she forgot to put on sunblocker, and got red as a tomato. That time Prim and her danced together on the first day of spring years ago. Her mother and father laughing of them.
That time Gale told her a dirty joke and she kicked him out of the tree, and spent the day laughing quietly about both things.
The day she spent with Peeta in the roof, before they went back to the arena in the Quarter Quell.
It was going to be a good day. At least not as bad as her days has been, locked on her bedroom, depressed and sad, but too tired to cry. She ran out of tears.
Unitll Haymitch sits right next to her, in a proximity she doesn't particulary enjoy.
"Hello, you". She opens her eyes at his voice, sounding sober. Sober? That's rare.
"Hi".
"God, Katniss. You look awful"
She doesn't respond. He sighs.
"How long since the last time you eated?"
She doesn't answer again, this time because she lost count of the days she spent with her mouth shut, pretending to Greasy Sae that her food was good. In fact, it tasted like ashes.
Everything in her life, she noticed, taste or look like ashes.
"You can't stay like that. You are going to die if you do so".
She shrugs.
"Listen, sweethart, I'm serious here. You really can't –"
"Leave me alone, please". She doesn't even bother to look at him, and that pisses the old man off. Haymitch gets up and throw his hands up.
"Whatever then, I won't be your baby-sitter, but the least you could do is help yourself. Just because they all died, doesn't mean you did too".
A sudden desire to run and hide shoves her. How dare he talk about all the ones that died? She gets on her feet too.
"What do you want me to do, then?" She spits.
He chuckles ironically. "Start by feeding yourself, huh? Then maybe, just maybe, if you be a good girl and stay alive, I can tell you a secret".
She waves her hand at him, turning around, attempting to go back to her bed and sleep the rest of the day out. Before she can get too far, though, Haymitch shouts to her something that makes her freeze in place.
"He is coming home, Katniss".
She turns to see if he is joking.
He's not.
What is that suppose to mean? Is Peeta coming back? To District 12?
He seems to capture her thoughts, because he nods and repeat.
"Yep. Peeta is returning".
She feels worse than ever. Her stomach flips and her head spins.
Haymitch smiles at her, and she try her best to do so, but it won't come out.
Who is coming home? Peeta or her Peeta?
He forgot me. He isn't mine anymore
He no longer loves me. He hates me.
So, as if it was the most reasonable thing to do, she runs upstairs and lock herself in her bedroom, taking her knees to her chest and rocking back and forth in her cries.
Somehow the tears managed to come back.
The next days, she remains locked inside the house. Greasy Sae keeps her distance. Haymitch doesn't bother her either.
She stops sleeping. Not even her nightmares or stupid dreams show up.
Katniss world is empty.
She hates it and hates him and hates herself. She hates that he left her alone in this. She hates that everyone left her.
She hates that she eventually left herself too.
The sun no longers catch her once olive skin – she is now pale. She closed the curtains, but peeks through if all the time, anxious, waiting for something to happen. Anything. If I could see..
Well, she doesn't know what she is expecting to see.
Untill she sees it.
There it is, the smoke going out of his chimney.
The first thing she sees about him in months is nothing more, nothing less than ashes. Oh, the irony.
Her heart beat faster and faster, and she's so weak now that she fears it will stop beating at all.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Her hands grip the curtains so she can keep her balance.
Boom.
Peeta. He is here.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
She wonders how the hell her feet remember how to run that fast. Last time she did, there were mutts and killers and bombs after her. At this moment, the only thing after her are regrets.
Her robe falls to her ankles and she let her socks somewhere at the way. In seconds, she is already under the hot steamy water of her shower.
It burns at first, but in a good way. At least she feels it.
Katniss back hits the cold bathroom's wall and she sinks into her knees.
When he was away I wanted him to be here.
Now here is here and I want him to go.
She gets mad at herself and tilt her head back, hitting the wall with such a strength she growls.
What pisses her off the most is the fact that she wants him back. She wants him in a selfish way only she could afford to have. She wants him in her bed, but only when its convenient. She wants his arms around her, but only because her nightmares goes away. She wants his massages, his cheesebuns, she wants him because he makes her feel confortable. At least more confortable than alone.
And she is pretty sure that she is not in the position to be selfish anymore. Not with him, not with anyone. And it really, really gets her mad.
The water keeps falling on her for what looks like hours. Maybe it has been hour, after all. But it's too warm, too cozy for her to leave. All the time her hands are gripping tuffs of her hair so hard they could easily go out, if she put a little more strength on it. Her legs shake, badly. Her back hurts. Her scars marking every single part of her body, as a sadist note the Capitol wanted her to have.
"Don't forget: This one was when you fell of that tree on the first Games.
This little one her were when Clove's knife touched your skin, lightly.
That is from the bombing.
This bruises here, oh, they are from the day you ran to him. He did it to you.
Peeta hurted you."
It is true, he hurted her, but not like that - or at least not much. He hurted her in the moment his eyes got darker. His blue, deep blue eyes got stormy, darker. He wasn't her sweet boy with the bread anymore. That was one of her worsts scars. The memory of him, not being him.
"I must have loved you a lot", he said.
"You did."
Overthinking all that scars inside and outside her skin, she realizes that, matter-o-factly, he hurted her because she hurted him in the first place.
His hijacking, the torture and mental disorder he walked through only happened because of her.
One more soul damaged because of the mockinjay.
I don't want to be the mockinjay.
Never again.
A/N: Hello! This is the first chapter of a (kind of) short story that popped up in my mind at some point of the dawn. I will alternate between the characters point of view, each chapter will be focused in one of them. This one was Katniss, next is Peeta's.
I hope you liked it.
Please review!