CHAPTER 2: Ice
As Peeta opens his house's front door and steps in, he feels the emptiness hit him. It smells like it has been closed for a thousand years , or even more – nothing like home, he thinks.
Home smelled like bread and flour and felt like happiness.
They say home is where the heart is, but he is not sure where his heart is anymore. He had, for a long time, find that place. It was where he wanted to be, since he can remember. Now his mind managed to confuse him enough to make it disappear from his memory, and everytime he tried to remember it hurted.
It hurted because his good memories and bad memories were mixed in a way he can no longer distinguish from real and not real.
He tries, though.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it just doesn't. He looses it.
He place his bags on the floor near the couch and lights up the fireplace. After a quick view of his own house, as if he had forget it (and in fact he did), he throws himself in the sofa and close his eyes.
Not to sleep – he doesn't sleep easily any longer – but because his eyelids feel heavy and his mood is no better than his tired face.
The cracks that the fire makes reminds him of her.
Her, the one person he trusted his heart to.
Her, who kept him alive.
Her, who made him suffer and scream and bleed.
Her, who is just next door, hiding in the shadows like him.
So close, yet so far.
Maybe it's for the best.
He feels like they both were strangers who knew everything about each other, two parts of one human being – separated by a wall they built with the time. A wall so big he can't even think about climbing, once the fall would be too harmful and they would both fail.
They both would always fail, they said.
Sometimes he believed them.
He wanted her next to him, and at the same time he didn't.
He didn't want her near when his mind played tricks on him and showed him memories he couldn't tell if happened or not. He didn't want her near when he remembered the tall, masked men that hit him over and over again; or the feeling of his arms hanging for hours in a chain locked to the roof, supporting his whole body weight; or when they electrocuted him under his nails and over his eyelashes and made him spend days without food.
He didn't want her near because they said him not to.
And that's why his mind is so full of a rage he didn't see grow in there. He gets angry easily, looses control of himself.
His house doesn't look like home, neither does his own body.
What bothers him the most is that, despite all his hate, a (not so small) part of him still loves her. And it loves her with every strength he can gets.
He loves her and hates her and hates himself.
And it all results in a horrible feeling of being disappearing. Like if his existence is slowly erasing itself from the universe.
He fears that one day he will be gone completely.
Sometimes he paints. All those therapists told him to, so he tries. But he finds it hard to put anything on the canvas that doesn't look like his own nightmares, a lot of gray and black mixed together in a disgusting view of solitude.
That's all Peeta feels.
Loneliness.
Haymitch brings him a lot of useless stuff that may cheer him up, as flour and confetti and pans.
They don't.
"Those cupcakes aren't going to bake themselvs alone, right?", says the old man, joining him in his kitchen table for breakfest.
Peeta doesn't takes his eyes off the food.
"Peeta. You can talk to me, you know".
"I've got nothing to say".
Haymitch raises his eyebrows. Peeta's words are famous for convincing crowds on his favour, making a simple phrase sound beautiful. And he got nothing to say.
"I doubt that".
He picks at his food.
"Well, if you are not talking, then I am speaking. And you have to listen. How bad is that, huh?"
Peeta doesn't even chuckle. Not a smile. Haymitch sighs.
"Ok, then. You have been here locked for four days now. The girl is locked for months. I'm not spending my last few days of life watching you both sink into yourselvs and die. Oh, please. I'm getting old and tired of this drama. Just go talk to her!"
He raises his eyes to meet his mentor's ones. Thats the first time he mentions Katniss and the thought of her makes him chill.
"I can't".
Not yet.
"Yes you do! Look, boy, everybody here is somehow damaged and hurted and blablablah. Or you go talk to her and fix this thing you two have or you will end up like me. Old, alone and drunk – taking care of two stubborn kids".
Peeta shakes his head. No.
"I'm not ready, Haymitch. I can't approach her like this after all I did. No. I need more time".
"Well, I think you both had time enough".
They stay in silence for a long while, eyes focused on the boring rout their forks make from the plate to their mouths.
This tastes like burnt bread. The kind of bread we used to throw away.
Peeta gets up and put his dishes on the sink, wich is a bit full since he doesn't clean up all the time anymore.
"Katniss is dying, I can see that".
It hits him like a slap on the face, mostly because Haymitch sounds so serious and worried and nothing like Haymitch would sound that it really scares him; but he doesn't turn around.
"And she will die for real if you don't do anything. She won't let me or Sae help, either. If you can't reach her, I don't know who can".
She is out of my reach for a long time now.
That day, after Haymitch left, he got upstairs and painted her.
The first time without blood and shadows – just her. Her and her beautiful gray eyes and her braided hair.
He did it in an attempt to get his mind rid of thoughts of her.
It didn't work.
He hid the paint.
Each day when he woke up, he would look to Katniss house and imagine what she was doing there, with all doors and windows closed. He wonders if she is dead already, and prays that she's not.
He doesn't find courage to go there himself check.
Peeta visits a new therapist, since doctor Aurelius and his nurses stood at 13. His name is Reane Fence. He can't bring himself to trust doctor Fence enough yet, so he hides the fact that his nightmares got worse since he came back.
Reane says he should talk to Katniss too.
He promises he will. He doesn't.
On the second week there, the solitude starts to eat him from the inside. Sometimes he sees his dad on the kitchen, or his brothers sitting at the sofa or his mother brushing her hair at the bathroom mirror.
The second he blinks, they are gone.
Peeta doesn't cry that easily. Instead, he hold onto things untill they break. The first thing was a glass – Greasy Sae took care of his hand. The last was one of his paints – an old sunset.
His worst episodes happens in the middle of the night, when he finally gets to sleep, but he wakes up out of himself. Many times he found himself standing on Katniss porch with a knife.
He then threw all the knifes away.
It was much easy when he got all those psychologists telling him "real" or "not real"; or Delly's kind words about how he was going to be ok. They all said him that he only needed time. How much time?
He watches the tapes of him and her and all those tributes who died. He watches the recorded news of the war and the interviews he had with Caeser Flickerman. He keeps returning the tape to the same spots: The cave.
The kiss in the snow at the start of the Victor Tour.
The beach at the second Quarter Quell.
They all seem to make him momentarily happy for a time, untill they don't.
Until watching them makes him even more sad, more lonely. Since that happened, he never dares to turn on the TV again.
Neither does he reads books. Not that he doesn't want to, reading was always a escape valve for him; but because he can't focus on the story and his mind drifts away in the first few lines.
Peeta discovers a new hobby, one that can't reflect his emptiness by shades of gray or black: gardening. Maybe for Haymitch's insistence that he should do anything at least to move his ass off the couch.
He uses his bakery apron to deal with the land and his gloves to touch the plants, since the touch of his hands seem to make them weak – his grip on things got rough with time.
Sometimes he can feel her eyes on him while he works. It sends chills down his spine and makes him want to turn around everytime; but when he does, her curtain is already closed.
One day he finally gets the courage to call the Capitol and order for seeds.
Funny how I can call the capitol itself, but not Katniss.
They are delivered in one day. When he opened the cardboard box to get the seeds packages, he honestly thought they were playing a sick joke on him.
Sunflower's seeds.
Violet's seeds.
Gillyflower's seeds.
Primrose's seeds.
Sick joke, indeed.
He plants them all, except for the primroses ones. No, these are her's.
It's on his the third week home that he decides to do something. Despite his episodes and panic attacks and nights spent awake only for the thought of her, he has to know if she's at least herself.
He finds it a bit selfish of her to lock herself that way, after all the people who died for her to be alive, but he tries to keep this thought away too.
He inhales deeply while grabbing his box of gardening equipment, the primroses seeds safe inside.
Now or never. A part of him feels safer saying never, but he doesn't want to pay attention to it. Each step closer he gets to her house, the more he regrets.
I can't comeback now.
He knocks on her door and nothing happens.
Again.
Nothing.
I shouldn't have come.
He feels exposed and rejected and is almost returning when she turns the door knob; his heart skips a beat.
She sighs.
"Peeta".
A/N: Hello again!
Thank you for following, favoriting and reviewing this story – it means a lot to me!
So, this chapter was harder for me to write than Katniss POV's one; probably because I'm used to her personality more. I'm sorry if it's not exactly as good as expected, I promise the next one will be nice. (=
Please review, so I can know what you guys think of it!
