Every morning, I wake up with the sun. It is a habit that was apparently unbreakable. Even during the darkest moments in Thirteen when I hadn't been able to remember how to make bread, or why I would possibly want to, my body was still ready to go do it at the barest peek of dawn.
So I was awake as the train slowed down into the station and because of this I noticed the flowers on the edge of the woods early the morning I arrived. The bright happy yellow was still stuck in my mind when I disembarked and gathered my luggage. Dr. Aurelius had told me that when things got stuck like that in my head, that it was my psyche trying to reassert itself. In other words, old Peeta – who had had opinions and morals and seemed to have been a generally put-together sort of person – was telling new Peeta – who some days would wake up see words on a paper, know they were words, even write down more words, but still found himself unable to read any of them – that he should take notice. These mental hiccoughs would become less and less frequent the more my original memories normalized, the doctor had claimed. But when things got stuck, it was important to figure out how to unstick them.
So I had walked back to my house, sat the few pieces of luggage I had on the porch, and then left Victor's Village with a wheelbarrow and a shovel I found in a shed – none of which I even remembered having owned before. These little surprises were a nice thing about having extensive memory damage. Maybe the only nice thing, but there was no point in being bitter about it.
I hadn't gardened extensively, or basically ever, before. At least, I didn't remember having done so, but I somehow managed to dig up five bushes and brought them back to Victor's Village. At this point, it was still only about six in the morning, so I assumed that everyone else would be asleep in their beds. I had forced myself to focus on the general idea of everyone so as to not focus on a more specific individual, thoughts of whom threatened to overcome me every few moments. I would plant the bushes, I would go into my house, I would unpack and then…
Well, then would try to begin the rest of my life, I guessed.
But as I knelt to the ground to plant the third bush, I head a door open over the nearly imperceptible clicking of my prosthetic leg, and then almost nothing. It was a sound I remembered well – noiseless feet running towards me.
Oh it was her already.
And then I remembered what it felt like when I was thirteen and in math class where she sat right in front of me. I had wracked my brains thinking of something, anything to say but nothing had ever seemed right, and so I had said nothing, just as I had done for the previous eight years, and just as I would continue to do for the next three. The strongest emotion the memory elicited was a general discomfort at the sort of unbearable embarrassment that only a thirteen-year-old boy can know, but it was a complex, detailed recollection that the mere realization of her nearby presence had unearthed.
"You're back," she said.
I looked up, and my reaction upon seeing her fragile body, frantic eyes, and matted hair was the convergence of two different thoughts at once: she is so beautiful and she barely looks like a person. How could those things be so simultaneously true? Neither had been the least bit shiny.
"Dr. Aurelius wouldn't let me leave the Capitol until yesterday," I tell her, trying to maintain regular breathing and neutral emotions, like he taught me. "By the way, he said to tell you he can't keep pretending he's treating you forever. You have to pick up the phone."
Her fingers pushed at her matted hair. She looked like a terrified, wild creature. "What are you doing?" it was almost a snap.
What was I doing? What were these bushes? Why was I planting them by her house? Yellow flowers, yellow flowers, yellow flowers... four petals they were...
Primroses.
"I went to the woods this morning and dug these up. For her. I thought that we could plant these along the side of the house," I managed to say, instantly regretting my pronoun choice.
Her response to me was bewildering, to say the least. She ran through about fifteen different facial expressions, starting with confusion, then on to that quick anger that she always had right before she realized she had made an incorrect snap judgment. Her face finally settled on gratitude mingled with shock, which barely masked what looked to be a sudden deeper realization and subsequent steely resolve. I found myself in utter disbelief at how clear these emotions were to me, someone who woke some mornings and couldn't even recognize the faces of people he saw every day. Of course, why she was reacting this way, of that I had not the slightest clue.
But she had no idea any of this was going on in my head, and after a quick nod, she ran back into the house. Shortly afterwards, I heard her making a ridiculous amount of noise upstairs. Something glass shattered. Then I could hear the water running in the tub. The bathroom window was open. I tried to stop listening after that because it had all already been nearly too much, but I still couldn't stop the thoughts that flickered through my mind. The curve of her shoulder in the interview dress. A flash of her bare thighs as she crawled under the covers. The smell of her hair. It was the same as always, and I knew where it would go, rushing headlong towards the images with edges that shimmered and shone. But thankfully, before I got to that point, the woman, Sae I remembered later, arrived and my thoughts sputtered into nothing. Despite never having really spoken before, she hugged me before she headed into the now quiet house.
"We could use some bread tomorrow," she said before closing the door.
Much later, as I was putting the shovel and wheelbarrow away, Katniss stepped onto her porch, bow in hand, dressed for the hunt. Her hair was washed and braided, and her skin was pink, as though she had been scrubbing it roughly. Eyes straight ahead, she tromped off her porch and marched resolutely towards the woods.
I baked the next morning, and I was just handing a loaf of bread over to Sae when Katniss came down the stairs, dressed to hunt once more. No one said anything, but instead of leaving as I had intended, I sat at the table, and we ate breakfast together in companionable silence. The next day, I woke up, baked, and came over to sit at her table once more. Without any sort of discussion, it became routine. It has been going on for weeks, and we still speak very little before she goes out to hunt. But it is something. Definitely worth waking up early in the morning for.
And now today, it is mid afternoon. I sit quietly on my porch writing a letter to Delly in response to the one I just received. It was an interesting read, to say the least. My sweet old friend met someone from the Capitol, another lost soul without a family, and they've been spending a lot of time together. Delly thinks she might be falling in love.
Her name is Julia.
It was an unexpected development for sure, but my first thought was how thrilled I am for her. I'm trying to write down just how much without sounding too shocked or excessively curious, when I hear a distant and steady trudging sound coming up the gravel road towards Victor's Village. There's only one person who it could be.
I try to ignore the way my heart leaps and focus again on the letter, the decision of whether or not I should apologize to Delly for being so distracted as to have completely missed the fact that she likes girls (or, at least, a girl) after knowing her for our entire lives is enough of a conundrum to demand most of my attention. I feel awful, somehow not realizing this about her before but I'm completely out of my element. Maybe she hadn't wanted me to know? Maybe she hadn't known herself? All I know is that she has been there for me when there was literally no one else who possibly could be, and deserves nothing but the best treatment any friend can possibly give, whatever that happens to be in this situation. I've just decided against apologizing – Delly's story is her own, and I might as well let her tell it in full before I apologize for anything – when I see a dark shape emerge over the crest of the hill. Steadily it grows until I see the body of a largish animal balanced behind a head crowned with dark hair.
She has not only felled a small deer, but then, instead of dragging it to the butcher, she carried it all the way back here. I'm uncertain why the relentlessly practical Katniss has taken this completely frivolous, not to mention physically taxing, journey until her eyes come into view. Then her smile. There is so much pride there that I'm breathless for a moment.
I stand, and the pages of my letter flutter to my feet. Sorry, Delly, but I will pick them up later. I want to run to Katniss, to pick her up and spin her around. I want to let her know how happy, how proud I am that she has done this. Not because I particularly wanted venison, although I'm sure it will be delicious, but because you would have to be an absolute moron to ignore the significance of this moment, to see how this small victory means that Katniss (my Katniss, a small voice echoes in my head) now has proof that her efforts to go through the motions of life are being rewarded.
That's what makes what begins to happen next all the more terrible.
I've seen it before I even process what it is I've seen. She climbs further up the hill, and there it is, on the side of her neck all the way down her shirt, across her breasts (which somehow makes it so much worse) dripping from the body of the doe.
Long smears of blood.
It's on her hands. There are flecks of it on her temples. In a flash, her joyful smile grows malevolent, predatory, evil.
No…
The world slows down, like it always does, and my last thought before the madness overtakes me is Please. Not now.
I often realize that I'm waking from an episode well before I comprehend where I am. The latter takes me a few moments, then it clicks that the fireplace I see is the one in my own living room. I sit up, as fast as I am able, and there is Haymitch, sitting in the armchair positioned near the foot of the couch. Sometimes I don't remember what happened during these things. This is apparently one of those times.
"Did I hurt her?" is the first thing I ask. My heart is desperate to know, but I dread his answer with every shred of my being.
He shakes his head.
I close my eyes in momentary relief, and then the rush of all the other implications my flashback will have on what we have so tentatively built hits and I put my face in my hands. I've ruined everything. She was so happy, and I destroyed it.
"Is she okay?" I say through my fingers.
He snorts. "Why don't you go into the kitchen and ask her yourself? She's making you dinner."
Dinner? Katniss? Katniss Everdeen?
I shake my head in confusion, and Haymitch, thinking I want to know more about what happened, heaves a sigh and begins to tersely explain. "Heard yelling. Woke me up. Came out, and the girl was shaking your shoulders, bellowing "Not real!" at you till you passed out. Helped her pull you in here where you've been asleep for the past couple hours. They been force-feeding you rocks in the Capitol, boy? You weigh a ton for someone so skinny."
"So she's not upset?"
"I'm not gonna say she's not a little shook up, but you didn't try to hurt her. Just kept telling her to go, or something. I dunno, it's all a little fuzzy. The two of you are loud as hell when you have a mind to be, I'll tell you that much." He pulls a flask from his pocket and takes a long drink.
"Why is Katniss making me dinner?" this is literally the first time I have said her name aloud since my arrival several weeks ago.
"I'd assume because she's hungry, and figured you'd be too once you woke up. Also, she's damn proud of that doe. I think she's pretty eager to eat some of it."
That is not the type of answer I was looking for, and we both know it.
"This is the point where a good mentor would ask you if you want to talk about what happened. I don't, really, but since I'm already here…"
"There was blood. On her. Lots of blood."
"Oh," Haymitch is thoughtful for a minute. "I know all about your list, boy. Does she?"
"She doesn't need to know."
He raises his eyebrows. "This afternoon's little performance seems to indicate to me that she does."
He's right, of course. I put my head back into my hands.
"She doesn't have to know she's on it, mind you. Or Tall, Dark, and Absent, for that matter. But this situation could have been pretty easily avoided if you'd just told her that the sight of blood sets you off."
"I'm supposed to be getting used to those things though," I say, feeling unbearably pathetic.
Haymitch laughs, and it makes it even worse. "Yeah, well, that's not exactly gonna be a quick process. I think, in this case, the combination of blood and her was a little much. Plus, she mentioned you looking really, really happy right before it happened. Made yourself all vulnerable."
"This is so humiliating."
"Boy, this is your life. And we're all pretty willing to help you, I think, but we can't if you don't let us. What's gotten in to you anyway? Since when do you care about being embarrassed? Aren't you supposed to be all sensitive and in-touch with your feelings? If Katniss was losing her shit, you'd be right in the thick of it, wouldn't you?"
I nod.
"So give the girl a chance."
He must see the doubt in my eyes, because his voice softens considerably. "Okay, I get it. She didn't exactly react as well as she could have to homicidal-maniac-Peeta back in Thirteen. But I've told you about five hundred times both before and since that you can do better than that bristly feral cat in there," he nods in the direction of the kitchen, "and you don't seem to give a damn. So, either you be honest with her about what sets you off, or you just avoid her all the time, because blood makes you crazy and that girl kills things for a living."
I swallow hard, and don't say anything in response. Haymitch stands and starts to leave the room. At the door, he stops and hurls his parting shot.
"Make sure you make the right choice, boy. Everyone knows you didn't just come back for the scenery."