.:Seven: Crutch:.
It is a dreadfully slow and painful four hour wait that mentor and victor spend in each other's company since Peeta left. Finally, with a haughty indignant snort, Haymitch exclaims my fidgetting and muttering is insufferable to be around, digs around in his pockets and flicks into my lap a patch wrapped in a little piece of foil. I let it crinkle around in my fingers and shoot him a skeptical look.
At least he lasted four hours. Way longer than I'd give him credit for.
"It'll take the edge off, trust me," he offers. "Just unwrap that little puppy, slap it on your arm, then sit back and enjoy the ride." He pulls out another and 'demonstrates' where and how to put it on and gives me a toothy grin as he stuffs a pinch of chew into his bottom lip. I give him a disgusted scowl and look down at what is no doubt a Capitol painkiller.
Normally, I'm beyond hesitant to administer any of Haymitch's "healing advice," considering the methods he uses to escape his problems, let alone anything Capitol-made, but between the throbbing of my leg and the visions I have of swimming in Rory's blood, it doesn't take me too long to rip the packet open and apply the patch onto the meaty part of my shoulder. It only takes five minutes for everything to slow down to a toddler's pace. I can't ever say the Capitol did anything half-assed when it comes to feeling good.
You're weak, a small voice says in the back of my mind. Look at the Mockingjay, a symbol of strength and freedom for the entire country, reduced to a blithering anxious cripple chasing the dregs of the past in a slurry of drugs and distractions. So emotional and explosive, it chids.
Perhaps I am weak, I counter, closing my eyes and letting the air escape my lungs long and slow through my nostrils. Maybe I'm all those distasteful things. But I've been strong enough for everyone else for too long, and if I fizzle out, who the hell cares?
"Oh, Sweetheart," he says as an aside, his voice bringing me outside of myself, and I watch as his mouth moves and doesn't exactly match up with the sound-it's a second or two off-"thought I'd tell you now, they make these things with a teeny bit of trackerjacker venom. In small doses, it acts as a numbing anesthetic. If you start seeing things, it's normal. Just ride it out."
I know I should be panicking, and my brain floods with memories from the last time I had the venom running through my veins: Caesar Flickerman hosting a documentary inside a forest, chasing me like an animal, my disembodied singing inside a concrete shower after murdering yet another high profile politician...but they're foggy and less intense than I would remember with a sober mind, like a faroff fairy tale or secondhand account I'd read in a fiction book. I swim through them, fixated on the notion that after all this time, I should be able to trust Haymitch enough that he wouldn't do anything to kill me.
And if I were to die, would it be the worst thing, after everything else?
Yes, it absolutely would. An amalgam of Finnick's and Prim's voices pipe up from the oncoming fog.
"Stuffsssssafe, right?" I think I say, trying to get up but sinking further into the couch. I want to laugh-everything is so giddy and warm. It can't be possible to feel so weightless.
"Well, it's been outlawed with the fall of the old Capitol, anything with trackerjackers, that is, but consider it a hand-me-down from us veteran Mentors. 'S how we used to get through some of the more... unforgiving Games."
"Ah," is all I can say.
"Hell, I don't even remember an entire year after Snow killed my family," my father's voice says matter-of-factly.
The lights in the room become fuzzy and fade into a soft golden swirl of color, and I suddenly find myself lounging in the grass beside my father's lake. I cannot see Haymitch, nor anything else, but I somehow know that I am still there. My father's presence is so strong, like the lazy heat of a barn in the summer, but he's right off-screen. I run my fingers through blades of grass, and feel Prim's slender ones tie braids in my hair. She's humming something, or maybe that's me.
"Father?" I murmur. My eyes trail further down the bank and I spot the clean plane of Gale's back as he and Rory flick stones across the water's surface, but the vision is patchy, like a mosaic.
"Nah, Sweetheart," Haymitch says in my father's voice. He may have been baritone, but there was nothing common about the sounds that came out of his throat when he opened it up to sing, and I cling to this sound. "But you can see why all of us mentors visit this place, hm?"
"If I had my choice, I'd never leave," I sigh, letting dandelions tickle my face. I see Finnick's shadow bent over in the sand, wriggling his fingers along the sides of his face to a bundle of giggling blankets.
I look for Rue, seeing as everyone else I care about is here, and sweep my fuzzied gaze across the landscape before remembering the trees. Her skinny leg swings lazily from a tree as she pops a few berries into her mouth while reading a book.
"Well, that's the thing, Katniss," Acker Everdeen says. "A lot of them, the mentors before me, they never did. This stuff is great for a getaway every now-and-again, but it's ruined too many lives. Some of them never came back." My father fades into the background noise.
I am floating on my back along the river, and the sounds of my father's band mingle with the song of a flock of mockingjays. I open my eyes to buttercream clouds tracking fat trails across a pink-orange-amber sky. Peeta's curls come into view, and I feel his fingers dance along my back underneath the surface. He strokes my hair, comforting and soft, like one does to a sleeping child, or someone dying.
His murmur ripples up from the depths of the riverbed. "One time, I spent three days mixing paint until I found the right shade for sunlight on white fur," he says. "You see, I kept thinking it was yellow, but it was much more than that. Layers of all sorts of color, one by one." The words echo in my brain and take a while to settle, but I remember this. I rip myself up from the water, and he's gone. The water has a slight red tent to it, like droplets of Peeta's watercolors as he washes the paint off of his brush in a water cup.
I watch white shapes converge and divide in the distance, along the silhouetted tree line, dancing slowly like reeds in the stream. His silhouette is bright as sunflecks on a rock, Peeta's, the shadows of unruly curls pushed by an unseen breeze, and he turns to me, hands outstretched. Reaching, pulling for me.
Haymitch's voice, far-off down a tunnel, pushes at me. "Don't go too far away from me, Sweetheart. There's a lot of dark places just outside the borders, and I can't get you if you run off, you hear? It goes bad real quick."
I crawl towards Peeta still, and as I do, it gets warmer, stickier. I feel like I'm crawling back to a womb. Outlines blur, and everything in my mind's eye meshes together. Dough in a mixing bowl. His bed full of pillows and blankets. I want to dive head-first and get mixed slowly into whatever this is.
The door cracks open, and his heavy uneven tread rattles the floorboards. A rush of cold air is pulled in with the vacuum effect of the front door opening. Peeta's voice explodes in my ear.
"Katniss! Haymitch! We found him! He's okay! Your map led us right there!"
Reality blotches into black-red as I stare into the back of my eyelids. His words are hurried and breathless. He ran here to tell us the news, and my stomach flips.
"Katniss?"
Our mentor has a coughing fit, and a brief period of silence ensues as Peeta absorbs the scene. My surroundings come back to me in drops of paint in water.
"Haymitch!? What'd you do to her?"
"Gave her something to calm her nerves," he says with a shrug and lights up a cigarette. Peeta rushes over and crushes the lit end with his finger and thumb. His expression is scrunched up in a snarl. "Not in the house, you know that." He turns his attentions back to me.
I hear the crinkling of the packet on the table behind my head and a sound of disgust. "Traqpaq? Seriously?" The disappointment emanating from him churns my insides.
"Don't you go around runnin' your mouth, Boy, or I'll have the whole District lined up outside my door with their hands out."
"I can't believe you, Haymitch. I leave you alone for three fucking seconds," he scoffs as he watches me. Is it possible to sink further into the couch? Maybe I can escape this whole debacle and wake when it's over. "Or, actually, I can. This is just the kind of shit you pull, isn't it?"
All I can think of is how dirty curse words sound coming from the his soft boyish lips.
"It was this or two dirty pieces of Seam trash tearing up your beautiful house trying to kill each other," he guffaws.
"You both are so fucking bad for each other," he snarls as he props up my drooping head underneath a steady hand. It is replaced by one of Clairen's throw pillows, stiff and too decorative for my tastes. The idea makes me want to laugh-my tastes? My mouth feels full of cotton balls. I hope it's a smile he sees on my face and not a swollen grimace-all my muscles feel numb, so I have no idea what they're doing to my face.
"You have no idea, Boy," Haymitch replies, chuckle-gagging on a swig of white liquor. "I could say the same for the two of you."
"What does that even mean?" Peeta's voice is close, and his face blots out the light overhead. "Katniss, Sweetheart, hey, can you see me?" I'm pretty sure I imagine the pet name, but he doesn't blink twice as he moves a single finger across the field of my vision. I follow it with sluggish eyes.
I nod slowly. "Peeta..." Is all I can manage.
He looks relieved, although the drug makes his face look like candle wax melting. "At least you're coming down. Can you move?" How does he know anything about drugs?
"Hell yeah she can move. She's made of some firecracker survivalist stuff. Normal soft girls would be stuck on that couch for the rest of the night." Haymitch shrugs and gets up. We all know who he's talking about, although I don't understand why he is saying this. Peeta's lips are drawn up in a thin pursed line. As Haymitch stretches his arms above his head, several of his joints creak. We both watch him stumble around in search of something to drink. "Listen, I'm not going to go into any intimate detail, but when Sweetheart's in a bit of pain, far be it from me to be the one to deny her anything. Call it a long-standing history of debt, and I'm her lifelong broker."
Peeta whirls back on me with a look of fire. "So you do know each other then?" He says, a bit hurt. No doubt he's recalling the conversation we had at Sae's birthday.
"We're Seam," is all I offer. I try to shrug, but I don't know if I actually pull it off.
There is a crack in the air, like lightning pulling over head-soundless and nearly imperceptible, but my body is finely-tuned to such a dangerous frequency. Peeta's body becomes rigid, and he cracks the knuckles of one hand with the flick of a wrist. It's a nervous tic that is such a stark crack in his put-togetherness, it cuts off the lazy swirl of blood through my limbs and the world starts to speed up again.
"Since when has being Seam become a hot selling point?" He says nastily. Clarity hits me and I see that his skin is wet and shiny, and the muscles in his arms are strained with the hard clenching of fists. I sit up abruptly, the fogginess pulling down my limbs and pooling into my toes to manifest as dread. "Because, if I remember my childhood, that wasn't necessarily the case. In fact, my mother always said anyone from the Seam was the scum of our District. Digging through trash and dirtying up the place."
He's never said something like this before, and I know now that he is morphing into someone else; Snow's mutt. I can't prevent the panic from taking hold. All because of me. The missing piece to his memories, his hijacking, his pain. This is all wrong-I am both floating a half-inch above the cushions and tensing up to defend myself from an attack for the second time today. I know my reflexes are incredibly off.
Haymitch barks at him, forever my watchdog, but I see his fear. Peeta smells it and jerks back around. "You watch that lip, Boy. Seems you've forgotten your mama's way of thinking was never very progressive."
Another shift as Peeta punts a pillow across the room with a swift kick, the metal gears in his leg whirring from the force. It thwacks against the wall and knocks a picture of a white wicker chair on a sand dune onto the ground. "This is great. I have to go meet my girlfriend at the train at dawn tomorrow, and here I am, dealing with this stupid shit instead," he stalks off into the kitchen, footsteps stomping on the tile. I have a clear view of him as he clutches the hand rail on the oven hard enough to snap it in two.
Panic roils into anger like lava spilling over me. I don't know if I prefer him as a violent menace or sniveling baby. "I never asked for your fucking help, not once!" I find myself saying and pull myself up from the couch by the armrest, knocking over the coffee table with my knee. I watch Peeta's clothes spill to the floor in a mockery of his caring gesture. The adrenaline and painkiller cocktail helps me to ignore the dull spike of pain shooting up my leg.
"In fact, I was just trying to get someone to help me bring back my partner! To help me make sure he survives! So that my District can survive another hungry Seam winter. Do you have any idea what that's like, Peeta?" I shriek. I'm being petty, and playing a dangerous game, and I can see the uncertainty swirling around his brain in a dangerous mixture of facial features, but I can't stop myself. A single twitch rips up his entire body, spurring me on. "That's all I've ever tried to do. That's all I've ever tried to do!"
"Listen, Sweetheart, take it easy," Haymitch warns, crouching in between Peeta in the kitchen and me by the sofa with his arms outstretched. "Don't get overconfident."
Peeta clenches the sides of his head and pulls at his sweaty hair. He drips down to the floor as spilled wine with his back against the cabinets. He bangs the back of his head into the oven with increasing intensity, rattling the glass containers on the counter. His voice is a tinny whine, like a spoiled Townie child. "God, I just... please both of you, get out-"
"I'm going to see how Rory is," I yell, ripping off the chair leg splint and shoving on my boots that Peeta set neatly beside the front door. His first aid handiwork clatters to the ground in something more final than any goodbyes we've shared. I quell the small part of me that worries about him injuring himself and wrench open the screen door so that it thwacks against the wall.
I leap out into the yard, now covered with a couple of inches of snow and roll onto my injured leg, but I don't cry out. I crawl part of the way until I can struggle to my feet and avoid the long gaping stride of his footsteps as he ran through the snow.
"Katniss, wait!" I hear Haymitch fall down the porch steps behind me, but I ignore him and press on in the direction of Town.
