Chapter 3: Districts 11 & 12
Chaff
"Come back to me," Rosie says, her voice a fierce whisper, her breath hot against his neck. Her fingers curl around the back of his neck, slide into his hair. "I don't care what you have to do. Just come back. I love you."
Chaff doesn't say anything, because she doesn't love him and they both know it, but it would be rude to point it out now. He just holds her, maps the curve of her spine with his palm, and lets her hiss desperate promises into his collarbone. He's not sure how to answer her or what she wants him to say; they've only been together three weeks. It wasn't that serious, just something to pass the time when they weren't working. He's only seventeen, Rosie's not even that. They were going to give it a month and then see how it went from there, but they have - had - their whole lives in front of them.
It was just supposed to be a bit of fun, a way to get through the Reaping and Games-month. Not this.
"I will," Chaff says finally. He gives her a smile that says they both know he won't - she goes to kiss him and he goes to kiss her but not at the same time and so they don't - and she leaves with a perfect tragic story that will set her up in lover's infamy for the rest of her life once he dies.
Except he doesn't die, does he. There's a scythe in the Cornucopia and Seeder told Chaff not to try for it, she told him to run in the opposite direction and just wait them out, wait like she did until the others finish themselves off, but it's right there. It's right there and it's shiny and only a handful of the kids in the Arena this year could even lift it, let alone swing it. Chaff's the best in his rotation, the only one the foremen have never had to use the whip on. They talk about him like he's some kind of trained animal for it but they're still proud of him - like a pet owner is of a dog who can shake hands, or maybe a hunter his finest pointer - and he knows how to use a scythe.
And so Chaff runs, and he gets the weapon, and on the way out he runs into the boy from One. He's big and pretty but Chaff's bigger, and they stare at each other for a long second before the One Boy snarls "Later, Eleven," and darts off to slit a little girl's throat. The others ignore him, and Chaff's mind blanks for a good five seconds - forever in the Arena, three kids go down while he stares - which means he should be dead, he should be more than dead, someone should have stuck a sword in his back long ago but they're focusing on the weaker ones and it hits him that they think he's too much of a threat to deal with now.
He got an 8 in training because he's big and threw some things around and pointed out a few plants he doesn't plan on eating, but the Careers don't know that, do they, and so he runs.
The Arena is filled with horror and murder and the Hunger Games are twisted like they always are, but the thing is. The thing is.
He's good at it.
He might not have years of training like the Careers, he might not have had a good, full meal in his life before coming to the Capitol and scarfing down everything they put on the table, he might be from the second-shittiest district in all of Panem, but he's good at it. Chaff used to steal food from the warehouse to feed his family when the tesserae ran out, and he might be big but he's quiet and he knows how to move. He knows how to use a scythe. He knows how to blend in with the darkness and how to step without making a sound. Days pass and he survives.
Seeder told him to hide and so he does, but it rankles inside him. He's cowering like an animal and the Careers are out there. They're out there and they're killing kids and they're laughing about it, and he doesn't care if they were trained or born or how they ended up the way they are, kids are dead and that's all that matters. He's in a tree when they catch up to the girl from Nine, and she's fourteen and she offers them all the food in her pack and they laugh at her and say they're going to take it anyway and then they take a long time to kill her. Chaff watches and the rage builds up inside him, and he knows this feeling. He knows it because he's felt it before when the foreman took a whip to a kid who wasn't picking fast enough, when the rest of them turned their eyes down to their work and pretended not to hear the whistle of the cord through the air and the screams of the boy as he begged someone to help him.
Chaff couldn't do anything then because it would just be worse for both of them, but there is no worse now.
Turns out when you're dead anyway, there are no consequences.
Chaff creeps into the Career camp one night, a strip of cloth from his sleeve tied over his face to hide the whites of his eyes, and he slits the throat of the boy from Two as he sleeps. He melts back into the shadows before Two finishes thrashing, and if the others wake up and look it doesn't matter because they don't find him. They look the next day but they don't find him then either, and when the Anthem plays the next night and DISTRICT TWO, MALE's face flashes in the sky, something digs itself in Chaff's gut and twists, dark and satisfied. It feels like the first time he stole an apple and went the whole day with it hidden in his shirt; by the time he bit into it, the skin was bruised and the flesh brown and soft, but it didn't matter. It tasted like an open window and a warm summer breeze. For once, an outlier is biting back.
He stalks the Careers. He waits, just like Seeder told him, but he follows them, and every few days he kills another. The alliance splinters after the second - nobody knows which one and they all suspect each other and there's only one winner anyway right - and that just makes it easier. The Careers finish off the rest of the remaining tributes over the next week, wanting to end it as soon as possible, and that means Chaff never has to make that call, never has to cross that line and kill someone who didn't deserve it. If they were smart they would've left one for him and forced him to do it, but they're impatient to finish. Or maybe the trained monsters don't realize that other people might hesitate, since to them everyone is meat and it don't matter how long it's been aged.
It's comes down to him and the girl from Four. Chaff doesn't remember most of the fight later, just that it took him three tries to pull the scythe free and it doesn't click with him that he's done, that he's won it, even after the trumpets peal and the announcer comes over the loudspeaker to tell him. He keeps whirling, looking for the next threat, and there's something on the ground, brown and soft and soaked with red, and then a wave of dizziness knocks him sideways. He tries to brace himself with his hands against the ground except he can't, and it's not because he's exhausted but because he doesn't have hands, he has hand, singular, and he's staring at the other one in the grass in front of him. It's not until he's on the hovercraft with the attendants pulling him toward a room full of IVs and beeping machines, pressing some kind of special pressure bandage to the tump of his wrist, that it sinks in what happened.
They bring him home a hero, District 11's first male Victor in the entire 45 years of the Games, and only the second ever. He hasn't slept properly in weeks, and all Chaff wants to do is find his family and bring them to the big new house, and then maybe he'll go find Rosie. She asked him to come back and he did, and it doesn't matter if neither of them thought he'd make it, he did and that has to be worth a million boyfriend points. How many of the others back home could say they went through the Arena for her?
Well. Not for her. Truth is, Chaff didn't think about Rosie once in the Arena, tried not to think of home at all so it wouldn't get tainted by all the blood and gore, but once he's on the train he can't stop. Her golden eyes, the wicked curve of her lips when she'd smile at him and crook her finger before leading him to the apple shed. The soft feel of her skin beneath his hands, warm and slick with sweat - not blood - as they lay tangled together on a pile of burlap sacks spread across the floor.
Except there are parties and dinners and meetings with the mayor and the bigwigs in the central district city, and it's days before Chaff makes it home. And even then 'home' isn't home anymore, it's the Victor's Village and that's on the far side of the district entirely, so it's another few days before he figures out how to call and ask for visitors.
When Rosie finally shows up, she doesn't take her shoes off, even though they're dusty from the road, and she shies away when Chaff reaches for her. He has a new hand now, sort of, it's a clumsy metal thing and he's still learning how to pick things up with it, but the doctors say his brain will reconnect with the pathways soon enough. For now he just has to be careful not to hold anything he doesn't want crushed.
They stare at each other, and this isn't the reunion Chaff wanted. He's seventeen and exhausted and he's killed five people - if Careers count as people, they don't really, but even if they're only half a real person that's still five half-people - and he wants surety. He wants the promise he forgot about but which now etches itself into his skin.
"I saw you kill them," Rosie says, and he looks into her eyes and sees the deaths all over again, reflected in the horror in her expression. "That last girl, you - it was like you weren't you anymore. It wasn't supposed to be like this."
Chaff still hasn't slept, even though the bed in the new house is nicer than any he's ever slept in. He keeps tearing himself awake, feeling invisible fingers at his throat, imagining weapons sliding between his ribs. He sees killers in the shadows everywhere, and he's still not convinced he's wrong.
"How'd you expect me to win?" Chaff demands, his voice hoarse in his throat. "You told me to come back."
"Not like this," she says, and he and Rosie used to fight, that's how they started this because she looks so damn hot when she's angry, but it's not like that now. Her eyes are wide and scared instead of hard and snapping with fury, and instead of balling her fists or cocking her hip at him she's curled in like she expects him to hit her. "I don't know - I was stupid, but not like this. I can't, Chaff. I'd be afraid forever, and that's not fair to you."
Right. You'd think winning the Hunger Games would save a guy the 'it's not you, it's me' speech, but apparently the odds are never in his favour. "Fine," Chaff says, and when he takes a deep breath to calm himself all he smells is blood and soot, and so he turns away.
Fifteen years later, Rosie's little boy Joshua stands in front of Chaff on the Reaping Stage. Rosie grabs Chaff after the ceremony, pulls him into an alcove, and she still smells the same, damn her, like oranges and cinnamon, and Chaff hasn't known the touch of a good woman since she left him. The giggling Capitol bits of fluff he picks up when the urge gets too bad don't hardly count.
"I was wrong," she hisses, her eyes desperate. "What I said to you, about not wanting it like this, I was wrong. Do whatever you can. Tell him to do whatever he can. I just want him home."
Chaff lives alone now. His ma and little brothers moved out after the night Solomon tried to crawl in bed with Chaff after a nightmare like he used to do, and Chaff knocked him halfway across the room. He hasn't seen them since. "You sure about that?" he asks her. She looks at him, face pinched, and doesn't answer.
Not that it matters anyway. Thirty seconds in, the boy from Two twists Joshua's head halfway off his shoulders.
"I'm out too," says Haymitch Abernathy, throwing his headset across the room as first his girl, then his boy, go down in a spray of blood. "Chaff, drinks?"
"It's like you read my mind," Chaff says, flinging an arm about Haymitch's shoulder. If there's any justice in the world, after the third or fourth he'll stop tasting bile on every swallow.
Seeder
The year after her win, both tributes are under sixteen. They look at her with wide eyes as the train rushes through the orchards, and in their faces she sees nothing but questions she can't answer, hope she can't fulfill, and fear she can only exacerbate. Seeder is only seventeen years old, and they expect her to save these children.
Except not really. Nobody expects her to save anyone; her win was a fluke, and she knows that better than anyone. If the Gamemakers had decided to make the quirk of the Arena anything other than the lack of food, she would not be sitting here with her back against the plush leather one year later. Seeder is the first Victor to be crowned without a single kill to her name, the only one who got her victory through nothing but unlucky circumstance.
The Capitol audiences are bored of her, the quiet girl with the golden eyes and unfavourable colouring. No one will be dyeing their skin and hair to match the look of the poorest of the poorest, the slums of Twelve and the barren fields of Eleven. In her interview she'd been modest out of terror, and she'd sat on that stage to desultory applause and known they'd rather have anyone else than her. The favourite had been the pretty boy from One, but any of the Careers, even the charming farmer's daughter from Ten, would have been better than the one who hid.
The other Victors, when she met them on the Tour, treat her with indifference at best, and seething jealousy at worst. The Careers don't think she deserves to be here, though they have no quarrel with her; it's not her fault that their own wasted away while she managed to cling to life just long enough to hear those trumpets, but they have nothing in common, either. They don't hold the same respect for her that they do the ones who spilled blood to be here. The other outliers, on the other hand, regard her with deep envy; she didn't have to kill anyone, didn't have to fight, and can turn a corner without tensing and searching for absent weapons. They shun her because it was easy.
They don't know that she dreams the same as all the others, of darkness and deep, gnawing hunger; of the other tributes by her bedside, digging their fingers into her shoulders, pulling her hair, demanding to know why she's alive when they are not. They've never been inside her giant house in the deserted Victors' Village and seen that every inch of space is stocked with food, cans and boxes of non-perishables lining the walls and filling every cupboard, because she spent three weeks dying of hunger and will never, ever do it again.
Yet she has no secrets. No tricks. No valuable inside information except how to tighten her belly and hang on with her fingernails while starvation claws at her insides, and she looks at these children, at the bones protruding from their wrists, and she knows this is knowledge she will not have to impart to them.
They look at her and ask her for advice. The boy's face is a mess of tears and mucus, and he wipes it on his twice-a-year Reaping-and-Tour shirt; the girl is better, fists clenched, trying to be brave, but her eyes leap about the car and can never settle on a single spot. Seeder pushes back the nausea. If nothing else, she can keep it from them a little while longer.
"Eat up," she says. "You've never seen food this delicious in your life, I reckon. You'll want to keep your strength up."
She only ever saves one, a young man brimming with anger who ignored every piece of advice she gave him and won on his own terms. Seeder's legacy is not in Victors, or sponsorship agreements or gifts or funds, but that her tributes never go into the Arena in tears, choking on the stench of their own deaths before it happens. The outliers sneer at her and say she's unrealistic - the Careers think it's funny-sad - but it's all she has. Year after year as her children are cut down before they have time to be afraid, Seeder tells herself that will have to be enough.
Haymitch
The one thing he learns about the other mentors is they talk a lot of shit about choice.
The Career kids choose to volunteer, is a popular gripe from the outliers, and Haymitch might have no sympathy when one of them rips open one of his girls and laughs at the blood shower, but nobody who's worked in the mines like he has would be able to back that up. A mouse might choose to go left or right but it's still the scientist who put him in the maze and teased him with the smell of cheese in the first place. Haymitch looks at those kids and he doesn't see choice, he sees brainwashing. He's more blase about the Career kids than the other outlying mentors because keeping grudges takes effort, and Haymitch is all out of fucks to give. So the Careers butcher his kids every year. If they didn't do it, someone would, and at least five out of six of them die every year anyway.
Meanwhile the Career mentors think that the outlying districts choose to send their kids in without training or proper food, like the only thing keeping them from making the same sweet deal is a kind of deep-rooted masochism. Haymitch hears them talking - he hears a lot of things, funny what happens when you spend all your time half passed out, people think you don't hear anything and that means they talk a lot more when you're around - and they roll their eyes, say things like victim complex and savages, like the kids in Eleven who spend all day climbing trees in the orchard ever actually get to do more than sniff one of the fruits they pluck. Everyone cries when a twelve-year-old gets picked, the Careers sneer, but anyone bigger or stronger could volunteer for them and they choose not to. It's all a crock of shit. It doesn't matter to the Careers that those strong eighteen-year-olds who watch a stranger stand up on stage could have three brothers and sisters at home, could be pulling double shifts and working twenty hours a day to keep their family fed. That even if it's their little brother or sister out there, it still leaves the most capable member of the family dead, and that ain't nice math but it ain't nice in the boonies, either. It doesn't matter to the Careers that in the sticks these kids see death every day, walking over corpses with their ribs stuck out like a xylophone, passing the crumpled form of somebody who got whipped too hard and now lies in a heap of bloody streaks, crawling with buzzing flies, so it's not really that big a deal which kid goes to the block this year.
His favourite is the one he hears most often, said by the escorts in a disappointed murmur, his stylists in a fit of fury as they wash the vomit out of his hair, the other mentors in a mix of exasperation, resignation and disgust. It's the biggest load of bullshit of them all, and it's the one that gets under Haymitch's fingernails like coal grime and never goes away no matter how hard he tries to scrub it away. He and the other mentors like him choose to let their kids die instead of helping them the best they can. That one morning Haymitch just rolled out of bed and chose to use his entire month's stipend on boot-polish liquor smuggled in through the back of the Hob and drink it in one go, that he just looked at the kids sitting wide-eyed and terrified in the train and chose not to care that they were about to be turned inside-out in just over a week's time. That he and the mentors like him chose to turn themselves into apathetic monsters.
Haymitch drinks, and when he drinks he gets mean, because that's how booze works in Twelve. It's not the fruity, fluttery things in the Capitol that taste like cotton candy and leave you feeling like you could float to the ceiling. Twelve rotgut ain't called that because it's what you serve your mama at a fancy dinner. It started with one, to help him sleep, only that one became two, and that two became four, and anyone who's ever seen a bouncing pebble turn into a full-on cave-in that fills in a tunnel and kills twelve miners knows what happened next.
About a decade in, Haymitch gets sick of hearing about choice one too many times, and he shuts them up. For three years running he stays cold sober, talks to his tributes every chance he gets, filling their heads with strategy and the right mix of encouragement and realism. He chats it up with sponsors - even fucks a few of them, the ones who like his sort of homespun roughness and sharp tongue - and makes sure his kids get the best deal they possibly could. He works his ass off as the others talk about how he's finally applying himself for once, and three years running his kids end up facedown in the dirt with their blood watering the flowers in the first thirty seconds anyway.
After that, the next year Haymitch shows up to Mentor Central for the bloodbath with a flask in his hand and a nasty glare twisting his face, and nobody says a damn thing.
Haymitch didn't choose to end up this way, but he did anyway. He didn't choose anything, just like nobody in Panem chooses anything. Except they do choose, don't they, all of them, at least according to the giant sack of bullshit that everyone keeps piling on, because that's what this country is built on, the illusion of choice and a whole lotta bullshit, and if everyone pitches in then it gets bigger, stronger. If they stop then it will dry up and fall down and the whole thing will crumble into dust because there's nothing underneath.
It's the sort of thing that sounds philosophic in his head but when he says out loud, the others titter and make remarks about his drinking because there's too much poison in it. And what's worse, to live on the top of a pile of shit or to die when it collapses?
For years, Haymitch believes it's better to stick with the hell you know than the one you don't, at least there are no surprises. But then comes a girl, who with nothing more than a little sister, a bow, and a boy who loves her, shows Haymitch that shit can be good for one more thing: as fuel for a fire.
For the first time in twenty years, Haymitch makes a choice. For the first time in twenty years, Haymitch shows up at the semi-regular 'poker game' that they keep inviting him to and he keeps turning down. He drops into a chair and jerks his chin in a nod. "Deal me in."
Plutarch Heavensbee smiles. "About time."
Katniss
"The President expects a good show," Haymitch warned her on the roof that night. "You'd better do your best, sweetheart. It's only starting from here."
She rolled her eyes at him. "I'm smart enough to know that," she tossed at him, heady with victory, with the feel of soft satin against her skin and the warm breeze against her cheek. The sky above her, wide and clear and open, no gridlines, no parade of the fallen, no Capitol seal. Even the chaos of the Capitol skyline below her, the coruscation of lights and cacophony of the thousands of voices screaming in the main square, pressed against her as a comfort.
"Ain't you just," Haymitch drawled, and shook his head, but he left her alone.
Haymitch is right - it's only just started - but not the way Katniss thought. She survives the Capitol, the harrowing interviews and coronation and all those parties, and finally, finally gets to return home. Except it's not the home she left behind. Katniss has changed just like Peeta swore he wouldn't, and she can't tell if it's just that she's so different, so broken, that what once felt familiar now rubs against her skin like sandpaper, like the rough men's trouser fabric out for barter at the Hob, or if home changed too while she was gone.
What she is sure of is that instead of leaving all the expectation behind in the Capitol, she's brought it back with her. And now she's drowning in it.
District Twelve expects her to be their symbol, their hero. People stop her in the streets, shake her hand, touch her face and run their fingers down her braid, and miss the part where she flinches, where she expects the knife or the sword or the ring with its poisoned spike. They tell her she's an inspiration, and they shove red-faced squawking infants at her - she's terrified, what if she breaks them, the only thing her hands are good for is firing arrows and building snares and placing flowers on the bodies of dead little girls - and tell her they've named them after her. They expect her to be solid. They expect her to give them hope. They don't know that Katniss has nothing left inside but blood and roses, that every day that passes the world presses heavier and heavier upon her until she rewards herself if she manages to get out of bed on her own.
Prim expects her to be the big sister who promised to save her, and Katniss tries, she does. Except that Prim's different too, older and harder and determined even though she's still so small, even though she never remembers to tuck in her shirt, and it doesn't make sense but that's the way it is. Prim talks about courage, about how watching Katniss on that screen gave her inspiration to do something, make something, and whenever Katniss tells her no, stop, stay here, stay quiet, stay twelve forever, please please please, Prim looks at her with her bright blue eyes so solemn and says you were brave, how could I not be and another piece of Katniss' heart breaks off and buries itself in her chest.
Her mother expects her to forgive, for the Games to put things into perspective and join the tattered ends of their family back together. To be fair, Katniss almost does. She went catatonic for a whole day after Rue's death - hours of her memory gone, replaced with nothing but screams, the wind in the trees, and the whistle of the mockingjays carrying out the final notes of her farewell song over and over until Katniss broke out of her stupor and used Rue's slingshot to startle them away - and she'd only known her for a matter of days. Her mother had known and loved her father for half a lifetime. But then Katniss looks at her mother, at the drawn lines of her face, at her hollow eyes, and thinks about stepping on that stage for Prim without a second thought, about the lives she took and the hells she faced just to come back to her, when her mother couldn't even braid Prim's hair for months, and it turns out understanding doesn't mean much at all.
Gale expects them to pick up where they left off, whatever that means, assuming they had anything to pick up in the first place, assuming there's anything left now at all. Katniss is nothing but broken shards, smashed and scattered on the floor, and at first she's grateful for Gale, for his solidness, his stubborn insistence that things can be the way they were, for his warm hands and the smell of the woods in his hair, for the way he helps her find the pieces of herself she'd forgotten. Except that there's a wanting now - or maybe there always was, and like with Peeta she just didn't know how to look - in the way his eyes pierce her when he thinks she's not looking, the pauses in his speech, and a new strangeness in his hand at the small of her back.
Haymitch expects her to let him down. Sometimes Katniss wants to, just to get it over with, except that letting him down means death for her, for Peeta, for her family, and so she grits her teeth and ignores the way he snorts whenever he sees her. She tells him he's losing his touch, that she only smelled him coming from halfway across the Seam this time. He tells her he's impressed she got dressed today, asks how many servants it took her to tie her shoes. She knows what he expects, but she'll be reaped again if she can figure out what he wants. She steals a bottle every time she stops by, just because she can.
Peeta expected her to love him, expected the words she said and the kisses she laid against his mouth in the cave to mean something; expected the whispered promises and platitudes and pleas to the sponsors, to the Gamemakers, to Haymitch, for someone - anyone - to care and save her, to be more than just the terrified and calculated moves of a terrified and calculating girl. He expected her to take his hand when no one was watching. Expected her to look at him with something other than confusion and distance as soon as the cameras flicked off. She's not sure which is worse, the expectation that was or the sheer, dull lack of it now. He avoids her, stays in his shiny new house and paints his pictures, and the worst part is, she can't even decide if she's relieved. She's glad not to have the weight of his hopes on her shoulders, but at the same time, having them ripped away and left dangling like the remains of a cobweb in her windowsill leaves her empty and desperate.
Katniss has run out of miracles, and so expects nothing of herself.
Peeta
He'd thought ... he'd thought. Well, he'd thought, that's all. He'd also been wrong. Peeta will have the rest of his life to let that stick, and the good news is, he's got an extra few decades more than he thought he'd have last summer, just to make sure he really understands. Haymitch is forty, and that's with him making his best efforts to drown himself with cheap grain liquor. Peeta should at least be able to beat that.
Peeta knew, when he sat there on that stage with Caesar Flickerman and told his biggest secret-that-wasn't - everyone in the merchant quarters knew, and probably half the Seam could've if they'd had the time and energy to care - that this was nevertheless news to Katniss, that the ache in his chest wasn't mutual. Nobody who hid behind trees for eleven years to watch a girl trudge home to the slums without even glancing back at him would think otherwise.
He didn't say it because he expected her to run into his arms. He said it because Haymitch pulled him aside and told him it was on his face plain as if he'd decorated it like one of his cakes, and Peeta was dead either way but he could save his girl, maybe, if he humiliated the hell out of her first.
And so he had, and he'd meant to leave it there - play Caesar, play the audience, play the Capitol, play the Games, play them all his way, with words of love and quiet resignation instead of acts of murder and monsters and madness - except Katniss changed all that. She changed it like she always had, on her own and without meaning to, without even knowing. She didn't know when she dropped that branch that Peeta had allied with the Careers to save her. She didn't know that she'd thrown everything into the wind.
Because the Careers saw Peeta turn back, saw him warn her, and as soon as the venom wore off enough for them to move, Cato dragged Peeta down to the river by his hair, slashed open his leg, and left him there to rot on the rocks. Nice of him to bring Peeta to a spot in the open, lots of cameras, with a good view of the sky so he could see Katniss' face in it when they killed her. "Enjoy the show, loverboy," Cato grinned at him. Clove kissed a knife and mimed throwing it at his heart.
Peeta knew, he did. Except that there, by the river, blood poisoning and the last of the tracker jacker venom pumping through his veins, somehow it all got confused. He felt her hands on his face, stroking back his hair; her lips warm against his throat. Her fingers, piercing his chest, digging deep and tearing out his heart. When he saw her in front of him the day after the rule change - an announcement he'd missed in the haze of pain and delirium - it was only one of hundreds, and not until she jarred his leg and he nearly bit off his tongue from the agony did he realize this time it was real.
Pain, real. No pain, not real. He should've made that connection sooner, kept it in his head long after she dragged him to that cave. Instead, Peeta made the worst rookie mistake of all, buying his own con.
Peeta's life is a bestseller, an action thriller with a romance tossed in to spice it up, pure fiction with only a grain of truth at the heart of it, yet here he is, standing at the front of the line on release day with a fistful of cash, waiting to devour every word.
It didn't much to sell him on his own lie. A few kisses, her head against his shoulder, the nearness of death and the desperation doing its best to claw its way out from the inside, and Peeta drank up every trick just as surely as the soup she fed him. When she looked at him at the end, the berries in her hand and fire in her eyes, he believed for those precious seconds that she meant it. That she couldn't bear to go back to District Twelve without him, that the lonely candle burning in his chest for all those years had finally found another to light, that the small, pathetic flame had spread.
After they win, Haymitch tells Katniss she has to convince the Gamemakers she did it out of love, not rebellion. Peeta only finds out later, because Haymitch never had this conversation with him. He didn't need to.
(There's a moment, during their victory interview, where Caesar Flickerman gets it. Peeta notices after the tenth or fifteenth time he's watched it - he can't stop, and he probably shouldn't, but seeing them together on that couch brings it home for him, helps him drive away the nightmares that they never left - and when he does he can't make himself stop seeing.
I couldn't imagine life without him, Katniss says, a shy smile on her face (Katniss is never shy, not like this, not modest and shy, not demure and shy, she gets angry and embarrassed and surly and squirrely but never like that, why didn't he see it, why why why) -
Peeta looks at Katniss, the cameras tight on his face as he smiles back (because he didn't want to, that's why) -
They join hands (her palms had been sweaty, why would they be sweaty when they were safe and happy, oh, oh it's so obvious now) -
Caesar Flickerman's expression freezes, stutters, and the easy, affectionate smile falls from his face, just for a second, and he looks at Peeta with horror and sympathy and savage understanding, like a dead man walking (Peeta didn't notice, his thoughts filled with her) -
And what about you, Peeta? Caesar asks, his face back to normal.
She saved my life.
We saved each other.
The audience goes wild, and there in the Village Peeta presses his fingers against his eyelids, hits 'rewind' and watches again. Maybe this time it will be different. Maybe this time Caesar will smile. Haymitch finds him somewhere around the fiftieth repetition and takes the tape away.)
He let himself believe it, swallowed the lie as easily as he would have done the nightlock, and no less painlessly, but what's worse is that he blamed her for it. He blamed her for playing him, for making him think she felt the same, even for Haymitch's favour, and they return to their district in awkward silence, a perfect mirror for their journey in the opposite direction, quiet and unhappy and unsure of whom to trust.
Katniss slips through the boundary fence again - Peeta watches her - and a few minutes later, Gale Hawthorne follows. They never come back together, but that doesn't matter. Peeta can't help the surge of jealousy, of anger. Did Gale slit a girl's throat for her? Did Gale run back into a cloud of tracker jackers to warn her? Did Gale spend two weeks prepared to die for her? Gale did none of these things, but it's to him that Katniss goes for solace, and Peeta chokes back his resentment and ruins a canvas with a careless swipe of the brush.
"What did you expect?" Haymitch asks when Peeta finally goes to him, broken and desperate and aching for reassurance from the only other person who might have a hope of understanding. "You really think that with all that, the starving and the killing and the hunting, not to mention keeping your infected ass alive, that she had time to fall in love? You owe that girl your life. She doesn't owe you shit."
Peeta has no idea why he thought Haymitch would be any comfort.
Two months in, Peeta sends the servants away. They're from the Capitol - it didn't feel right, using people from Twelve - and their constant presence unnerves him, reminds him of the Avoxes in the Games Complex. Dad doesn't care, and neither do his brothers - they spend most of their days at the bakery anyway - but Mother is furious that he would be so selfish.
She screams at him for what feels like hours, then pulls back her arm to strike him like she's done so many times over the years - his mental vision fractions with the memories - except this time there's a difference. This time Peeta's arm blocks her hand before it reaches his face, before his mind even realizes he's moved. This time he steps in close, twists his hand in her shirt. He says, "Not anymore." For the first time in his life, Peeta sees his mother afraid of him. For the first time, Peeta realizes that his naive wish on the rooftop, to stay the same and not let them change him, was as stupid as everything else. For the first time, Peeta wonders what others see when they look at him.
He thinks of Haymitch on the train, his foot digging into Peeta's chest, pinning him back against the chair. He wonders if he'll ever scrub the Arena from his fingers.
His mother moves out the next day. Dad and his brothers go to the bakery. Katniss and Gale sneak off into the woods. Haymitch staggers home with a fresh jog of moonshine from the Hob. Peeta locks himself in his room with his canvases and uses every last drop of red and black in his supply.
Nothing's changed. Everything's changed. Take your pick.
