Written for Prompts in Panem, Day 4 - Seven Deadly Sins - Wrath (1)
Bonus: To watch the fanvideo for this fic and the song Light a Fire by the incomparable akai-echo, click HERE.
Part 2: The Book of Memories
In the quiet that follows, I try to imagine not being able to tell illusion from reality. Not knowing if Prim or my mother loved me. If Snow was my enemy. If the person across the heater saved or sacrificed me. With very little effort, my life rapidly morphs into a nightmare. I suddenly want to tell Peeta everything about who he is, and who I am, and how we ended up here.
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
I brought her bread afterwards. Everyday, without fail. I helped Greasy Sae make breakfast. It was quiet at first, as Katniss fed all her bacon to Buttercup. But I watched as slowly, after many lost days, she came back to life. At first, it was barely a slice, then two, until the day came when she had no more bread left from the day before. She set out to hunt more often and that thing happened that I'd been waiting for - the color came back to her cheeks. She filled the hollow confines of her clothes. She lost the appearance of a wraith and slowly returned to herself again.
I came to her every morning, at first just for breakfast, but then I stayed longer. It's funny how it happened. She didn't ask outright. She didn't say, Come stay with me, I miss you and I'm lonely without you. That wasn't her way. Not at the beginning.
Instead, she started with showing me things. Her father's bow. Her parent's wedding picture. The spile from the arena. She described the woods, plants she'd found, asked me to plan a garden with her.
I tried to reciprocate, tried to talk of my parents, my brothers, of life in the bakery, but it was all very confusing in my mind. Memories poured over each other like cataracts, a jumble of disjointed images that were familiar and yet strange. I wanted to remember - they were my family, after all, with all their defects and imperfections. And they had died horribly. Sometimes that realization came on me as if it were the first time, and I stayed in my room, to wrestle with that truth, either in silence or with paint.
I kept all these things to myself.
"It's almost lunch time," she said one day, her voice so low, I thought it might crack. "I caught a few squirrels today."
"I can help you cook them," I offered.
She gave me a half-smile, the first one I'd seen since the Quarter Quell. Her face strained under the strangeness of the expression but soon, her muscles remembered and she eased into it. It brightened her face, making me feel a little dizzy. I had forgotten the effect she could have on me.
After that, we cooked together often, saying very little and only ever about the food. But in that quiet kitchen, I didn't feel the awkwardness of the silence. I felt calm and at peace because I was with her. And to some degree, she seemed to feel the same way. She was serene as she cleaned meat or cut vegetables. I knew her nights were terrible - I barely closed my eyes for fear of what I would see on the other side of them. I saw the faces of my family and watched them become consumed by flames and bombings, unable to stop it from happening. I could barely remember anything else - the hijacking had made my mind a strange place when it came to drawing out the memories of things - but I could bring to mind their deaths in vivid detail, though I had not witnessed them myself.
And I heard Katniss's screams pierce the night. The routine of each day seemed to ward the evil away for just a little while, but it came back every night to visit us both.
One day, when we'd had our lunch, Katniss left the kitchen and brought back a large box. The Capitol seal on top made me wary.
"What's that?" I asked.
She moved the flaps aside, pulling out the packaging that held a large, leather book. When she handed it to me, I was impressed by the elegance of the cover and the quality of the thick paper inside. I thought of all the sketches I could draw on paper as fine as this.
"This is beautiful!" I said, with real admiration.
"I got the idea from my mother's plant book," she said as I studied the binding, which opened discreetly to permit pages to be added.
"Which idea?" I asked as she turned to serve the tea she had been steeping.
"A Book of Memories," her voice shook as she said this, and I knew we were treading new ground. "There's so much I wish I could just...forget...things that I can't stop thinking about, no matter how hard I try. But I don't want to forget...them. I want to remember all the people who mattered...to us..all the people who were lost."
It was the first time we spoke directly of the dead. We were so skittish in that period, doing everything to not disrupt the delicate equilibrium we'd found with each other. We could hear each other screaming out our nightmares into the night. We both understood why we tried our best to stay away from town, why we drew a tight circle around our lives and let very few people in. We were burned and damaged, our new skin still raw and we didn't want to press issues too hard because we were so afraid that if we did, we might start bleeding and never stop again.
"We can...we can write what we remember and maybe add a picture…" she stammered.
"I can make a sketch if we can't find a picture to add…"
Katniss nodded her head in approval. "Dr. Aurelius said he would help with supplies and research, if we needed it." She furrowed her brow when she said this. "But I don't think we'll need research. We have enough between the two of us to add the information we need."
"We're enough," I agreed, in newfound admiration of her. It was such a brave and beautiful thing to do and for a moment, I forgot myself and pulled her in for a hug. She was warm and soft, her bones no longer so prominent under her skin. I became lost in the smell of her, so familiar and yet, after so much time, like new again, that I didn't realize what I'd done until I felt her reach beneath my arms and wind around my back in return. I almost pulled back, ready to apologize for being so forward but her grip was firm and I realized she was hugging me back. A million moments surged through me - the Victory Tour, the long, terrifying nights on the train where all we had was each other to feel safe against powers we could not control. The Arenas. The beach. It was us over and over, trying to hold onto something safe and good in a world that was far from either.
I gave up all thoughts of letting go, and we held each other for a very, very long time.
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The Book of Memories brought us closer than anything we'd done before. We had no particular order, so Katniss followed wherever her heart told her to go. We started with Rue, filling several pages about who she was, her family, the names of her mother and siblings. It was the first time we cried like we'd never cried together. Each page was a tiny memorial, a remembering and sending off of each person who had become a victim of the previous regime. Katniss did not want them to slip off into oblivion. They would have a permanent place, not just in our hearts, but in the book also.
We never again cried as much as when we put that book together. We had found a way to talk about the things that happened to us, about our grief, our guilt - Katniss felt responsible for everything, and the guilt pushed her into bouts of depression so deep, I thought she might never return. But she did. Every single time. And when she came back, she sought me out, and we recommenced our work again, tirelessly honoring the dead.
Then the day came when Katniss asked me if I wanted to add my family. I sat, somewhat stunned at the suggestion.
"But your book...is for the Tribute...the ones who died in the Games," I asked in confusion.
"Our book, Peeta," she said firmly. "It's our book and it's to remember everyone we lost, not just the Victors. Our families should be in there at some point. I...understand if you aren't ready to add them but one day, you should."
I was still at the our book part of the discussion and hadn't realized until then that Katniss saw this as belonging to both of us. I always thought of myself as an assistant to her project, but she saw it in terms of us, another alliance, another thing we did together.
Together.
"I try not to think about them, I suppose," I said. "My memories...I forget things sometimes. I think it's a leftover from...the hijacking, you know?"
Katniss's face twisted in agony, and I knew I'd said the wrong thing. Maybe I'd reminded her of when I tried to strangle her, the numerous times I'd tried to kill her. "Katniss, no! I'm not a danger to you, I promise! I just...my memory is wonky, that's all."
"I'm not worried about you hurting me!" Katniss exclaimed, standing up to pace as she spoke. "That's not it at all!"
"Then what? Why the look?" I asked, sincerely curious.
"Because it's all my fault!" she exclaimed, the truth bursting out of her chest.
"It's not your fault!" I stood up also, alarmed that she could still think that way. "Don't say that!"
"It's my fault and I…" she began to breath quickly, tears bursting from her eyes as she began to sob. "It's my fault that they...hurt you…" she doubled over in pain and sank in the chair nearest to her, crying her heart out. I was completely taken aback at how we'd gone from the Memory Book to my hijacking, but, I reasoned, it was bound to come up eventually.
"It's not your fault. None of this is your fault," I said, gathering her to me, letting her cry into my shoulder. "You didn't hold me prisoner, push the needles into me. You didn't order any of it. It was all Snow. He was trying to hold on to the little bit of power he had left…"
"Peeta!" she gasped, in a voice full of rage, her heart still racing against mine, "Why did you even come back? To this? To me? You could have so much more!"
I pulled back, astounded by the accusation in her questions. "How can you even ask?"
She struggled to stand but I held her in place. She had gone from grief to fury that frightened me in its self-hatred. "You know why I came back." I answered.
She stared at me, her hiccups and sobs subsiding as her eyes swept my face, the anger she had misdirected towards me vanishing as quickly as it had come. Without warning, I felt her fingers at the back of my neck, pulling me towards her. Before I could register the act, her lips were on mine, a gentle but insistent pressure that begged to be acknowledged. Without hesitation, I responded in kind and kissed her back, my lips opening slightly to invite her in. It was salty and sweet and full of longing. With that kiss, she'd broken through two of our fears - my fear of burdening her, her fear that she'd damaged me.
After, we played the Real/Not Real game whenever I had doubts about my memory. We coopted the game for ourselves and in that way, Katniss coaxed the memory of my family out of me. I added my mother and father, my brothers, and the bakery, with detail after detail, so many things that I started my own journal and essentially wrote my family's history. As if a dam had broken open, the memories of the things that once made me who I was flooded my mind and took their rightful places again in my soul's history. It was another one of the many gifts Katniss would give me.
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