Reality inexorably smothers the high she'd felt on having sprung Peeta from the Capitol. It starts in the form of stairs. Three, to be exact. That's all there are, leading up to the porch that wraps around her house in the Victor's Village, the only one that remains, a single tombstone in a sea of bones. Across the way, Peeta's brief former life is but a gruesome snarl of concrete and rebar scattered with charred lumps of wood.
With a bit of rope and some luck, Katniss gets Peeta and his chair into the house. She breathes and Peeta lists as they contemplate yet more stairs, many more stairs. She's so tired, so very tired, but these stairs lead to a real bed, an attached bath, and a window like he likes.
So she leaves him slumped in his chair, right there in the entryway like a wayward shoe, while she takes a brief foray into the nearby trees, wrestling back branches. She fashions a makeshift gurney, the way she and Gale sometimes did to transport larger game, like the occasional wild boar. It takes her several tipsy, heart-jolting tries, but she's eventually able to use it to haul Peeta bodily up the stairs, strapped to the sled like a carcass. She shouldn't be able to do this, except he's so very thin. Then more wrangling of limbs until she can slip him onto the bed, bundling him in warm and soft. Through it all, he remains pliable and peaceful, like he's just taking a quick nap.
And that's about when the red phone starts ringing, folks having finally figured out where she went. For a while, she answers it. She listens to the words on repeat. What have you done, what were you thinking. Some of them mean about Coin, some of them mean about Peeta.
Effie tells her that now she's really done it. Haymitch tells her he's going to speak on her behalf, at her trial. He's with me, she tells them, when they ask about Peeta. Mother offers to come. So does Haymitch. She turns them down, these half-hearted gestures. Both of them need to be anywhere but here, where there's nothing. Mother backs down only after Katniss lets her arrange for regular checkups for Peeta. "Make sure he drinks plenty of liquid," she says. "And rotate him once a day." Like he's a turkey, roasting over a spit.
The phone keeps ringing. She unplugs it, after she's talked to everyone who matters. But the seeds of doubt they've planted start to fester in her thoughts. The first day, she looks in on him often, every hour. But there's no change. Peeta just sleeps. Well after the meds wear off, well after the morphling shakes fade, well past the time when he should have woken up. She thinks back to a time when he religiously rose before the sun. He'd always been an early riser, a product of his family's vocation.
Days in, she starts to second guess. She'd saved Peeta from the hands of yet more doctors, more tests. But now what? How can she hope to succeed where the world's top medical minds had not? What can she possibly do for Peeta that others can't? She doesn't know, but she knows she has to try. She has to try because Peeta would do it for her. Already had done it for her.
The day after father's funeral, mother didn't get out of bed. Katniss tells Prim that it's okay, Mother just needs time to grieve. They went to school that day without food. Day after day, she turned Seamfolk away from their door with an, "I'm sorry, she's not well."
There was no money, so there was no food. There was also no Mother. She just sat there, clinging to the arms of father's chair (like a child clinging to a stuffed animal), and did absolutely nothing while her daughters starved. Katniss remembers screaming at her, even slapping her. Wake up, please wake up. But nothing could reach her, wherever she'd gone.
Behind a bakery, Katniss dug through trash for scraps. It was Peeta's bread—baptized by rain—that had given her the strength to duck under the fence. Her first time alone, without father. She'd been terrified, afraid that she wouldn't do it right, that she'd get caught.
Peeta had done it for her, given her the hope to go on. Now, she'll do the same for him. Like her mother, Peeta will get better.
She has to believe this.
"Peeta," she says. "Peeta."
She cups a bowl, warm between her hands. It's soup, the kind she used to make out of nothing but herbs and water, in the lean times. Holds it up to his chin, in hopes that the pungent smell will wake him. Earlier, she got him to drink a bit of water, dribbled in his mouth, a reflex.
Enticed by her herbs, Peeta stirs at last, mumbling something incoherent, although he doesn't quite crack his eyes, heavy with his long sleep. Still, she takes this as a good sign, lifting a spoon to his parched lips. Eventually, he sips and swallows, one spoonful at a time, almost half an hour to get through half the bowl.
But this is okay because Katniss is so very glad that Peeta is drinking and he's eating and he's mumbling things even if they're still incoherent. This is good, this is great, this is the start of something. The doctors were wrong, they have to be. Peeta will snap out this, you'll see. He just needs time and sleep and then we'll just see.
And she's telling herself these things with a fanatic fervor, almost as though she can will them to be so. Right up until the point where Peeta's had enough of the soup, turning his head away. And when he shifts and curls back into himself, that's when she feels it—the sheet beneath her knee is chilled and wet.
It's not just from sweat.
She presses her fist so hard into her mouth that she draws blood.
Katniss leaves him lying in it, viciously ransacking sheets from too many other bedrooms in this huge house. Then she strips Peeta's bed from around him, rolling him from side to side as needed, as she's done for all these days, heeding her mother's warning about bed sores.
His soiled sheets sit in an accusing heap, right where she'd dropped them. If Hazelle were here, she'd know what to do, how you clean this sort of thing, and the mattress besides. But she's too embarrassed to request the aid of some new laundry woman whose name she doesn't yet know. Too many new names. Too many new faces. And so many faces she expects to see but doesn't.
For days, Katniss scrubs bedding in the tub, hanging it to dry on rope she strings across the yard, white flutters in the breeze like a surrender. She lines Peeta's mattress with plastic, but it crinkles loudly when he shifts and doesn't always help. Days stretch into a week, then two, then three. She tells herself that what she's doing now is no different than when she helped Peeta relieve himself in a cave, into an empty can of stew.
But she doesn't fool herself.
It's different.
She knows it's different.
Everything is different. In that cave, she wasn't afraid to ask for help.
She feels buried in it, an avalanche of sodden sheets.
When the news is back on, one of the first segments mentions them, a quick soundbite delivered by none other than Effie Trinket. "As spokesperson for our dearest Victors," she trills, "I'm here to inform you that Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark have retired to District 12. They ask for privacy in these upcoming months, as they adjust back to life in their home." Then she sheds the sober and rallies with a hearty, "Back to you, Caesar."
"There you have it," someone says, and Katniss almost doesn't recognize him, this chameleon. He looks like a different person, having shed his hair, teeth, and tan, his gift for sensing which way the wind blows. He looks small.
Somewhere off-camera, Effie gushes, "I've always wanted to say that."
Flickerman signs off with, "We wish them all the best."
There's a knock on the door. The sound sends a shiver, so much for the request for privacy. Katniss creeps to the landing, peeking to see. Too early yet, for the doctor. Probably a beetle. Or maybe someone else from the Capitol, reconsidered, come to take Peeta away from her at last. But the shape through the frosted glass is too stooped, too gray to be Capitol.
"Hello, girl," says Greasy Sae. Her sharp eyes peer from a face scarred with time and too many years in the mines.
For the first time, Katniss thinks about what she's wearing, her hair, can't remember the last time she washed it. She's been so focused on Peeta that she's lost herself.
"When I heard you were here," Sae continues, "I came straightaway to offer my services. Would be happy to cook and clean for the two of you, at least until you get back on your feet."
Katniss doesn't let herself glance up the stairs, to where he is. It's tempting, so very tempting, to take Sae up on her offer.
"Thank you," she says. "But we're fine. We just need to be alone for a while."
"Well then," Sae says, following the flit of her eyes. "You know where to find me."
The rest of the day, Katniss braces herself, half expecting the phone to ring or the beetles to show up or the hovercrafts to drone overhead, taking aerials at least. But after Sae, the day remains peaceful, almost as though someone shelters her. Or perhaps what's left of the media has real things to report on, for once.
That night, someone comes for her as she sleeps.
She awakens with screams in her throat and darkness in her eyes. Surges up but she can't see, this dark, alien cavern, walls shrinking in. But she knows, she knows that she's not alone in the room, that some slinking, stinking mutt has slithered into the house and up the stairs and into her room and is on a final dash for her bed. It would be just like Snow to have sent some assassin to make the long trek from the Capitol to 12, arriving only now, well after his death, now that the monitor told everyone exactly where she is. A final countermove, the last laugh.
Frantic, she flings herself from her bed, jerks on the lamp, and dives for her closet, where she keeps her bow. And when she whirls, time nicked, bow nocked, she sees it.
The empty room.
The soft light of her lamp explores every crook, every cranny, nowhere for a mutt to hide. Her room is emphatically empty. The night is completely quiet, completely calm. Not a peep from Peeta these past weeks, as though he no longer dreams.
Yet still she stands and breathes, overcome by her racing heart, aiming her arrow directly at the dark portal of her open door, beyond which loom indistinct shapes. As her breath calms, rational brain catching up to the madness, she begins to think that maybe, just maybe, she'd dreamed it all. There is no mutt. No final plot. A nightmare, that's all it was, the stress of the day, go back to sleep.
She's about to lower her bow when she hears it—the same soft sound that started all this. This time, she understands that the sound doesn't come from below, from some new horror snaking its way toward her.
An irrational, impossible thought: it's Peeta. And indeed, the sound she hears comes from his room across the hall, from beyond the door she keeps open as a bridge between their worlds, the better to hear him. Peeta moves. She can hear it now, the soft slough of quilts as Peeta frees himself. The creak of his bed as he shifts and pushes off. The pad of his bare feet. Peeta's walking. The bow slips from her fingers and clatters to the ground but that's so okay, it's so incredibly okay because Peeta's moving and he's walking and he's coming toward her because he's heard, her screams in the night. And he's coming to her, the way he always will. Because he gets them, too, oh, he gets them, too.
Her heart beats Peeta (lub-dub) and she's desperate and giddy for it, for Peeta to come crashing through her door, hair and eyes wild, feet racing, heart racing to make sure she's alright. And she'll assure him that it's fine, she's fine, it was just a nightmare. And then she'll ask him, what she always asks him and he'll say, what he always says. This is what she thinks (hopes), poised before the portal of her doorway, the one that will deliver Peeta back to her at last.
And she waits and she waits until she realizes that, although Peeta is moving and he's walking, he's not coming. At least, not to her room. Instead, he shuffles and staggers within the boundaries of his own room, toward a different door, toward a different room. And the next sound that she hears—a private, almost musical sound—is one that, despite her initial disappointment, she's never been more grateful for in her life.
She sobs herself back to sleep.