Part IV Setting: The Night Before the last Interviews (and the grand costume unveiling) & Quart Quell/Hunger Games 75
But one thing is left us now; that is—
Begin it again
- "Da Capo" by Henry Bunner
Peeta had gotten up for the bathroom, and detoured for water.
Preparation for the Quarter Quell was hellish. Because no one knows exactly what it would be, but everyone knew it has been designed with only one goal in mind: the brutal murder of the Star Crossed Lovers, and hopefully with it, the eradication of the Rebellion they'd unwittingly started. The one no one was quite sure how aware or unaware Katniss is about.
They trained in everything. They trained in nothing. They talked. They didn't talk. There was a helpless inevitability in everything. Effie never stopped sniffing even when she was smiling. Even when everyone, including Effie, sniped at each other, in a need to be able to do something.
They didn't pretend to be discreet in sharing the same cabin in the train this time. Katniss slept, but less restful hours. The nightmares came more frequently the closer they got. Peeta didn't sleep much at all. When exhaustion claimed him only. Most nights he laid awake and watched her breathe. The flicker of her eyelids. The way her hair worked itself into mats.
The beauty of the girl who was his fiancé, but would never be his wife.
The last truly perfect day of his incredibly messed-up life.
He hadn't planned to detour toward the kitchen.
Or to bump into Cinna on the way there.
"Shouldn't you be sleeping?"
Peeta didn't have a shirt but he'd shrugged, the night and the company lacking reasons for a self-conscious response. "If I don't I assume there are some new kinds of shots my megalomaniac team will give me, to make me look like I've had the most radiant rest for the last year. I could ask you the same thing?"
"I didn't sleep much the last night before your last interview either."
"Last weeks'?" Peeta asked, weakly, as he squinted against the lights of the kitchen compartment flickering on due only to their stepping inside the room.
Cinna shook his head, "The last one before the 74th Game."
"Worried we won't do well?" Peeta tried to make it flippant and light.
They were all down to hours left that they might ever see any of these people ever again.
The trio on each of their design teams walked around with puffy red eyes, swollen mouths, and bitten nails. Haymitch almost always had a bottle. Which wasn't new, but he had an alternate habit, of mysteriously going missing for an hour or two, that had Peeta watching him closer than the drinks did.
Cinna didn't say anything and Peeta watched him walk to cabinets. Grabbing a first glass, then leaving a hand hovering over a second as he glanced back to the blonde boy with the question spread across his conflicted features. Peeta nodded, looking over the room as he waited.
"You'll both do fine," Cinna finally said, holding out the filled glass.
"Then?" Peeta prompted the topic that needed no words.
Which Cinna's expression seemed to contain. That and so much more he couldn't make out. Seconds passed toward a minute and Peeta considered apologizing. He wasn't the same person he'd been the last time he'd been headed into the games. He'd gone toe to toe with Haymitch about being owed for being abandoned the first and sold his golden ticket, without so much as looking at it, for Katniss to come home. Again.
He'd told Haymitch he'd get into any bed it required if he didn't agree.
Peeta drank his water, watching the man not too far from him.
Then decided to try a completely different tactic.
"You've been wearing make-up."
Cinna's mouth moved, turning toward a smile as he shook his head, blinking out of whatever set of thoughts he'd fallen into during their mutual silence. "I do that sometimes, Peeta. I'm a designer."
"No, you don't." Peeta corrected, his mouth turning toward a frown. With a caveat, "You've never done it before the way you've been doing it lately. Not even when they were interviewing you about the flaming costumes."
Not garish and nothing that stood out as wanting to grab attention. Thin and specifically applied, like veneer. To conceal what neither of the trio teams or Effie could. Cinna's make-up was portraiture. An art. A necessity.
The same as how he only displays the severity of his sympathy in side glances toward them, when they are otherwise busy with Effie or Haymitch. The only hints that he is just as concerned as everyone else. Placed behind smiles and designs and jokes about needing to shine Katniss up again after her last six months in the rough.
"I just-" He just what? Wanted to say somehow it was okay, when absolutely nothing was okay with any of them anymore. And he would be murdered on TV in a number of days, for the person he could barely live with the thought of living without. Peeta awkwardly tilted his water glass in his two hands. "-wanted you to know I noticed."
There was a long beat of silence as Cinna looked at the glass in his own hand, before he spoke, quietly, with incredibly mixed emotion to it. "Good. Some of us don't want to be remembered best for our ability to conceal."
