Chapter Two
There Artemis of the showering arrows ... healed his wound and cared for him. Homer. The Iliad.
That, of course - the illusion of Katniss Everdeen - was a fever dream, he thought later, his body in the grip of a fire so intense that he thought he was standing in the middle of an inferno, his flesh and soul melting away. Slowly, slowly, the shadows in the dark concrete room stretched up, loomed over him. They made vaguely human-like shapes as they moved along the walls, encircling him steadily, as if they were the escorts sent to him from Death. Steady in the middle of the morphing shades was the silhouette of the woman - dark and steady - sitting watchful among the phantoms. His eyes were hazy, gauzy, phlegmy and he could not see her body - he could only stare at her shadow on the wall and wonder who she was.
Of course, he thought he saw the girl. He always saw the girl, long after he had accepted that he never would again. Once, Meliora had spontaneously started braiding her wet hair - it had looked darker than normal - and it had moved him in a strange, gut-twisting way. Then, he had said and done some things that in retrospect … but were hard to back out of, once done ... and anyway, what did it matter? What did it matter?
Melly, he moved his mouth and tried to say her name out loud. But it came out all wrong - "Kat-niss," his voice said. It had been years and years since he had said the name aloud. Not that anyone would ever have known the significance of her name on his lips. But he had sealed it away, anyway, keeping the secret, still - it was the only thing that remained. So, it must be kept; once told, he felt, it would vanish into the ether, leaving him deflated, emptied of the one thing that had ever really mattered.
And now, in a fever dream, he was expelling it, disgorging it. He could not stop saying the name of the dead girl whom he had loved in silence. "Katniss," he gasped.
"Shh," said the woman, and he felt something wet and warm draped over his forehead. His skin sizzled at the contact, and then, slowly, coolness spread over him, like a breeze blowing suddenly through the midsection of a summer day.
The shush of her voice worked like a drug and his eyes closed, slowly, taking him from darkness to darkness and, although he knew that to sleep was to potentially sleep forever, he could not resist exhaustion.
"You're awake," she said.
He blinked. It was lighter now, and his eyes were clearer. He felt weak, exhausted, sore. But much better.
He looked down at himself and started to find himself naked. Or nearly, at least. He wore nothing but his undershorts. His left calf was wrapped in some soft pelt, and now memories flooded him - his reckless venture into the woods, the call of the stream - the sharp and sudden pain as the trap snapped over his leg, leaving him helpless and dying.
He looked back up at her and squinted - trying not to see Katniss Everdeen, but failing hopelessly. He had never spoken to her - rarely got close enough to her to even attempt speech. But those gray eyes - pearly gray, shifting in the light, catching her moods as real pearls catch colors: at turns sharp, sulky, bright, questing, calculating - he would know anywhere. So - was he even?
"Am I?" he croaked.
"Yes, but not out of the woods," she replied, brusquely. "I got your fever down, but your injury is bad. I can set your leg and bind the wound, but that was a rusty trap and -."
"Was that your - bear trap?"
"Bear trap?" she laughed, but harshly. "If that was a bear trap, you'd be dead, most likely. Anyway, your leg would probably have to come clean off. That was one of the Capitol's old traps - meant to capture rebels, not kill them."
"What - from the Dark Days? That would make it almost a hundred years old."
"Very good," she said sarcastically. "Your sense of time and space is returning."
Peeta was silent at this, wondering what he might have said while fevered. Well, whatever it was, he could not be held to it. Surely not. Something to work out later. For now, he was flooded with questions for the present. Everything was impossible. "I thought - we all thought - you were dead," he said.
"Good," she said. "You were meant to."
He shook his head and looked at her face. She looked so much the same. She was lean, small and lithe. He remembered her with a hungry look - a wolfishness to her eyes, a certain gauntness. That was gone, but in its place on her body was the hardness of whatever life she was leading now. She was tautly muscled, compact; no ounce of her was at waste. "No, but -."
She held up her hand. "First, shush. Speak softer. Second - try to imagine the position I'm in, believed by District 12 to be dead, but now witnessed not to be. And then try to imagine the position you're in."
He raised his eyebrows. "You mean - you will have to kill me?" he asked, only half joking.
"I didn't say that. But wouldn't it be wise for a person - in your position - not to ask too many questions?"
Of course, of course. But he had them, anyway. And - someone had been charged with, hauled away for, her death. Probably executed, though once one was extradited to the Capitol, there was never really knowing - unless you were in the Games, of course.
"So," she said, "Peeta Mellark - you survived the Reapings."
It was as if she had the uncanny ability to walk right into his head and read his thoughts. And now he shrunk from the conversation … this touched one of the darkest, most painful periods of his own life. He had spent long years deliberately not thinking about the Reapings. He did not want to go back there. "In the sense that I'm still alive," he replied, finally. "Yes. But the horrible secret to the Reapings is … you don't really survive them."
"What the hell does that mean?"
He shook his head. What was clear now was that she - and it was remarked at the time, but the scandal of the arrest had buried all other discussion - had disappeared from the District - she and her younger sister, Primrose - at exactly the moment that Primrose was about to enter the Reapings. So, perhaps she wouldn't be able to understand. "If you don't go, it's only because - people took your place. I think - everyone lives with that. Even if they don't realize it."
So many more questions now. Where was her sister? And what had been Gale's involvement in all this, after all?
"Until the people start blaming the Capitol more than they blame themselves, the Games will never end," she responded.
She thinks we're weak, cowards, he thought. And she's right about that.
But it still didn't seem very fair. Not when people had stayed - and died for it.
"Both things are true," he replied. "Look," he added. "People will come looking for me."
"Yes." Softly, this. The softer her voice got, he thought, the deadlier it sounded.
He wriggled his leg, testing it for sensation. It felt swollen and numb.
"You're not getting far on that thing," she said.
"I don't want to give you up. If you could - leave me with some food or something. Enough for a few days."
She shook her head, emphatically. "I have business in these parts. I can't leave, yet. If we could get you fixed up …." she bit her lip and frowned down at him.
"Yes?"
"You could be of some use to me."
She was strange, he thought - at one moment bristling with distrust, hiding her secrets - the next plainspeaking and familiar; she seemed to have some trust in him, perhaps despite herself, and he wondered - he wondered if she remembered. "I absolutely could," he said, but his enthusiasm was dampened with a thought that came straight from his own strangeness, from the place inside him that had never been normal: I don't want to leave her. Not so soon.
She laughed. "You honestly don't know how badly off you are. Oh, well. You need to eat. So do I."
She left him alone with his thoughts, which were so wild he could barely keep pace. It had all happened at once - the disappearance in early summer and then that dreadful Reaping. If he could gut that particular year from his head, he would - and gladly. He had tried for so long to do it. And, though happiness had never come to him, a certain amount of contentment had. Now that was torn asunder, like the girls' dresses, found in the woods - covered in blood.
Blood. It had spattered the screen in an exact moment of the Games that year, hiding for a second the awful killing, the body savaged by the wolf mutt in the arena. And he had vomited, vomited - spraying the bathroom above the bakery with his bile. He had vomited until white flakes from his stomach lining came up, and then blood.
When she came back in, he was trembling. She had a small tin pot, steaming with something that made his empty stomach twist horribly. She poured the contents into two of her rough wooden cups, then knelt down next to him to help him drink. When he tried to lift his arms to intercept her, he found he could barely move them.
Her braid slipped loose from its coil and draped itself over his shoulder while she gently tipped his head back and put the cup to his lips. It was turkey broth - he knew this flavor well. It had never tasted better. He listened to her breathe while the warm liquid drizzled down his throat and warmed his insides. His listened to his heart. It was rapid, and perhaps not just with the fever.
When it was her turn to eat, he watched her and he said: "I still can't believe I'm talking to you. And you … you said you remembered me?"
She didn't look at him, but stared down into her cup. "Why would I not remember you, Peeta Mellark?" She frowned. "I owe you. I owe you. And a debt is a difficult thing - to shake."
In the silence following this remark, he heard the sound of the birds that were greeting the descending dusk. A cheerful-enough sound, if taken in isolation. But he associated the evening birds - owl and nightjar, mockingbird and nightingale - with the struggles of his late teens, with the depression and the dissolution of his family ties. Of haunting the Meadow until twilight, of sleeping in late and losing friends, jobs and all sense of himself.
"What?" he said. "What do you owe me?"
The look she gave him was an exact replication. Confusion, surprise, the swift descent of joy and most of all hunger, desperate hunger. Remembered as keenly as it was experienced. Then her face adjusted itself back into the present - lean and cool. "My thanks, at the minimum. My life - possibly my life."
He gasped a little - he couldn't help himself. Once upon a time, he had given a starving girl some bread. He had been proud of the act, duly proud. But he had never even thought of it in such broad strokes. He stumbled over the words. "I only did what I thought I … I only did what anyone …."
"Then why were you the only one?"
He averted his eyes, looked down at his limp fingers, at his bare white legs. The pain was slight, but it felt hot and swollen. "Well - I think your debt's more than paid off, Katniss Everdeen. You can safely forget me now."
He looked up in time to see her grin - it was the first look of genuine delight; conversely, it made him feel unsettled and a bit guilty, and he wasn't sure why. "You're the one who needs to forget," she answered.
"Forget? I don't think … that's not something I think I can do."
And that was why. Because he wanted to say things like that and he shouldn't say things like that. Because it had taken exactly one second for everything to come back - all his shy affection and the nascent desire. And now - he was older, more experienced - sadder, far more cynical. But there was an eleven year old boy inside him, still, at the intersection of childhood and adolescence, everything innocent and sexual swirled together. Where the feelings began and ended, it was too complicated to say - there was light and laughter, there was the desire to touch the girl's cheek, just brush her lips with the tip of his thumbs. Just to know what they felt like. And that would be too much - and he knew that if he had ever dared to do it, he would immediately withdraw, blushing from embarrassment, blushing also from what he would later know was desire.
One time, he had danced with a girl called Catrine, and it was all because her name was so similar. But when they had locked fingers, the scent of her was both like flowers and like skin and he had felt - for a second - like both pushing her away and pulling her in, parting her hands and her hair and her lips.
But it hadn't taken. Not like she had. And he had spent years getting over her. Only to find out that he hadn't.
"What do you mean?" she was asking him, the fuzzy question inevitable and completely unanswerable.
"The girl," he replied shakily, "who was murdered in the woods? If people have stopped talking about Katniss Everdeen, it's only just recently."
"Murdered?" she asked, her brow furrowing. "What made you all think I was murdered?"
"Wait - isn't that what you meant? When you said we were meant to think you were dead?"
"Dead in the woods - not murdered. Why murdered?"
He opened his mouth to answer before realizing that his answer was not an answer. Because someone was accused of your murder. That made no sense, now. Since she was alive, someone had been falsely accused. This shifted the world as he had understood it for the last ten years of his life. "It was - assumed, I guess," he stammered. "I don't know. I was sixteen and there were just - these rumors and speculation. The discussion was with the Peacekeepers - we all just were left to wonder."
That wasn't the entire truth. Of course, murder had not been the original speculation. The girls who fled to the woods ended up dead - that is the fate of girls who flee to the woods. Then other things were said, and other things … and the feeling of helplessness - his anger at the universe for taking away the girl had focused on a single target. And he had been happy to see someone punished for the crime ….
She had accepted his explanation - at least, she had not made the logical conclusion. And she moved on to the next topic. "What were you doing in the woods?" she asked him.
"Your mother sent me," he said. "Actually."
"My mother?" she choked. She half looked away from him. "I don't believe you."
"No, it's true. I was desperate for something strong to treat headaches. She said - it was rare to find growing wild around here, but you could occasionally run into a plant called feverfew. I thought - it was worth a shot. In fact - if you look in my pants, she drew me a picture."
"You must get terrible migraines," she said, reaching for his pants, which were folded on the floor nearby. "To risk the woods and roaming murderers."
"It's not for me, and it's not -."
"How is she?" she cut across him. "My mother?"
He pursed his lips as he stared at her. She was looking down at the folded up paper she had retrieved from his pocket. There were things he would not tell her. How her mother had spent a month in custody after the daughters had disappeared, for aiding and abetting their flight. She lost her modest house in the Seam, was homeless for awhile. Sympathy (once the murder charges had been made) and generosity - especially from, of all places, the town drunk and resident Victor, Haymitch Abernathy - had got her set up again, eventually, in another small house in the Seam, where she worked as an apothecary, of sorts, for the miners and the poor of District 12. Like himself.
"Does she know? That you're alive?"
Katniss shifted her weight and sighed. "It's been many years since I've been able to leave her word. And I could never be sure - absolutely sure - that she ever got it."
"Well," he said. "She keeps herself busy. Dispenses medicinal herbs, when she can. Treats burns, broken legs, your basic injuries."
"Headaches?"
"... Headaches, yes," he said. "In this way," he added, "I could be useful. I could get her a message."
"Peeta," she said, shaking her head. She reached for him, specifically for the pelt she had wrapped around his leg. He held his breath, watching her. Liking the feel of her long fingers on his knee. Dreading the revelation.
He swallowed. His leg was punctured with the pattern of the teeth of the trap that had grabbed him. Where the bone had been broken, there was a bulge, purple and red. But worst of all was the least-noticeable discoloration - the red streaks reaching from the largest of the wounds, up towards his knee.
Blood poisoning. So - it all didn't matter. He was dying, anyway.
"So, you see," she said in that soft, deadly voice. "You see my dilemma."
