Dinner Party

AN: This scene happens between Chapter One and Two of The Time It Takes


"Have you got his head?" Katniss hissed between her clenched teeth, her face contorted with the effort of carrying Haymitch's feet. I was supporting most of the weight of his upper body, but his head lolled back and forth across his chest. The sickening sweet smell of vomit and liquor seemed to be pouring out of his pores and I wanted nothing more than to leave him in a heap on his couch. But my better angels prevailed and I squared my feet beneath me as I started to back up the stairs.

"I've got him as good as I'm gonna have him Katniss…let's just get him up the stairs."

"This…is…just…typical," she snarled and her eyes flashed dangerously on Haymitch's face.

I chose to say nothing and focused on getting him up the stairs. When we reached the landing I made to start toward the bathroom, while Katniss moved toward his bedroom.

"We can't put him in his bed like this," I said calmly. "Just help me get him into the tub. I'll take it from there."

"Just like old times," she sighed.

"What?"

"We've done this before…on the train to the first Games. Don't you remember?"

We rounded the corner into Haymitch's bathroom, which was fortunately large enough for the three of us. Katniss and I lowered him into the tub.

"I vaguely remember giving him a shower," I said uncertainly. "I thought that was during the Victory Tour…or was it the Quell?" I moved to the mirror and looked at my shirt. It had remained mostly free of vomit, so I unbuttoned the top three buttons before pulling it off over my head.

I walked back over to the tub and started pulling off Haymitch's shoes.

"I think I may have given Haymitch a few baths over the past couple of years. Seriously though, you don't have to stay," I said, smiling a bit and turning toward her.

Her face had gone white and she stared at me in horror, her right hand covering her mouth.

"Katniss, what's the matter?" I asked, suddenly very alarmed.

"I'm sorry," she said distantly, "I'm so sorry…I know we try not to look…try not to see the scars…" Her voice trailed off and she leaned into the wall behind her, though her eyes never left my chest.

I looked down.

There were burn scars, though I doubted that was what had her so unhinged, since she had just as many as I did. No doubt it was the scarring left by Dr. Whyte. She had made it her mission to find ways to get the venom into my body in greater quantities and at faster speeds. The insides of my arms bore multiple purplish track-like scars where she had inserted ports for me to be injected with venom. At one point she had placed a port just to the left of my breastbone and between my ribs so that she could inject nearly directly into my heart. The resulting scar was massive as her surgical technique had been experimental and her suturing left a great deal to be desired.

I froze, not knowing what to do. I wanted to cross the room to put my shirt back on, but I was afraid to give her a view of my back, since it bore similar evidence of Whyte's brutality.

"Katniss, look at me," I said quietly.

"I am," she whispered.

"No…look at my face."

She blinked her eyes several times as though she was trying to tear her eyes away before she finally forced her eyes to meet mine.

"This is the past. It can't hurt us anymore," I said, though a number of my mental doors started to rattle. I couldn't be certain, but I thought I detected the sound of footsteps on the stairs and somehow I knew they belonged to Dr. Whyte.

"I knew that you'd been tortured, but they said you were in good shape. I thought it was just venom. Not that venom is just anything…but I didn't know." She reached out a hand and took a step toward me.

"Don't," I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. My heart rate was starting to pick up and I could taste something bitter at the back of my throat. The lights in the room suddenly seemed over-bright and there were footsteps in the hall. "Can you wait downstairs for me? This will only take about ten minutes or so and then I'll come down."

"Are you sure?" Her brows were furrowed.

I looked quickly at the door and saw a shadow fall on the floor and extend into the bathroom.

"I'm sure," I whispered, forcing a smile onto my lips.

She left the room just as Dr. Whyte entered.

She started in on me right away, saying the most hateful things, but I tried not to hear the words. I focused on pulling Haymitch out of his soiled clothing and washing the mess down the drain. When I was finished I draped him in towels before hauling him up onto his feet. He regained consciousness for a moment.

"Are we swimming?" he slurred, before his head dropped and I had to catch him over my shoulder.

"This is what your life is going to be now, Peeta. Nothing but hopelessly broken things to try to mend. You'll be bathing this drunk for the rest of his miserable life until he sees fit to actually choke on his vomit and die. And that girl…"

"Don't say it," I seethed through my teeth, as I half dragged Haymitch down the hall and dropped him onto his bed. She followed me into the room.

"Did you see how she looked at you? Like you are a monster…like you are a freak."

I threw a blanket over Haymitch before storming out of the room.

"You are not real," I spit acerbically over my shoulder.

"I find it amusing that your brain finds me real enough to actually make me walk up the stairs and follow you up and down the hall to have me enter a room. I am very well embedded, wouldn't you say?"

"Shut up!" I yelled.

"Peeta, are you okay?" Katniss called from the bottom of the stairs.

I pulled my shirt back over my head before I answered. It was instantly soaked with sweat and I felt a moment of despair at the futility of my situation, that Whyte could be set loose all because I wanted to keep my shirt clean.

"I'm fine," I called down to her, keeping my voice even. "I'll be down in a minute."

"Who are you talking to?"

"Haymitch woke up for a second."

I looked at my face in the mirror for a moment before wiping it with a towel. My burn scars were blazing red from my exertion and my eyes looked wild. Suddenly something that Dr. Whyte said stuck in my head and I had an idea.

I turned and took several steps toward Dr. Whyte before hissing in her face,

"Yes, you are well embedded in my perception of reality. So you are bound by some rules. Try getting out of a room with a closed door."

She looked moderately shocked as I quickly spun on my heels and walked out of the bathroom, slamming the door closed behind me. It was like I was closing one of my mental doors on a monster with no real hands to turn the knob. I knew it wouldn't keep her at bay forever, but it was a little short-term trick that I had up my sleeve, and I couldn't help but feel a small measure of triumph. The more weapons I had in my arsenal against that particular monster the better.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs Katniss was waiting.

She handed me a glass of water, which I gladly took from her, drinking it in three large gulps. I placed the glass on one of tables in the foyer.

"I'm sorry," she said quietly, looking at me from the corner of her eye. "I didn't mean to get all upset. I just didn't realize how much you'd been hurt. You know…physically."

I nodded at her, not really sure what to say. I didn't really feel like trying to make her feel better when I was the one who had been tortured.

"Do you want to get out of here?" she asked.

"Yes."

We walked out the door into a night brightly lit by the moon. Haymitch's house was the largest on the street, a full three stories, with an expansive lawn. Due to lack of maintenance it had turned into a field filled with scrubby bushes and wildflowers. It was pretty in an odd way, especially in the moonlight, and I ran my hand along the top of the grass as we moved down the walkway to the street.

Katniss walked close to my left, our arms brushing against one another. Her closeness was one of Doc Lou's strategies for my flashes so that I wouldn't view Katniss as a threat. We were supposed to touch in friendly, non-threatening ways. Doc Lou had explained in her typically gruff and snappy tone,

"You know…touch each other like you used to…before all the war and torture shit happened."

Katniss and I had looked at one another nervously for a moment before I lowered my eyes. She and I both knew that our former easy familiarity was a thing of the past, but we did our best. I appreciated the effort she was making to try to put me at ease as we walked, but all that I wanted was to get back to my house and have a heavy dose of the sleep syrup Doc Lou had prescribed for my nightmares.

"I knew I shouldn't have invited Haymitch," she said sullenly.

"Well, technically it was his house so we were the invitees," I sighed.

"And what's the deal with him going on about sacrificing one of the geese?" she asked, irritability. "I swear, if he does anything like that with one of them I'm taking them. That's good meat and I don't like burnt offerings unless I can eat them."

I started laughing quietly.

"Ah, yes…Haymitch's drunken absurdities. They could make a television show out of it."

She smiled a little at that, but then became serious again.

"He is just so broken. He's never going to be fixed."

I shook my head and looked up at the moon.

"You don't know that," I sighed, letting out a long breath. "We're getting better despite everything we went through. And fixed? That's kind of asking a lot of anybody. He's been dealing with having the blood of dead kids on his hands for a quarter of a century…it's going to take some time."

She was silent for a while and started kicking a stone out ahead of her as we walked.

"That first set of tributes after he won the second Quarter Quell…do you remember the girl's name?"

"Scarlen Bishop," I said without missing a beat. My serious studying for our Quarter Quell had only been with regard to surviving Victors. Before that I tried to block out as much about the Games as I could. But since coming home I'd started collecting the histories of the Games, mostly as a way to preserve the memories of the people who had lost their lives, but also as a reminder to myself that everything that we'd done and lost to put the Games to an end was worth it.

"That's what I thought!" she exclaimed. "Scar…he says that sometimes when he's really been drinking. I thought he was just referring to a scar or something…but tonight he kept referring to it as a 'she.'"

I thought back to the 51st Hunger Games. Scarlen Bishop and Krispin Delevor were the District Twelve tributes that year. Scarlen was seventeen years old and Krispin was twelve. Her strategy during the Games caused a great deal of controversy in the Capitol and though her death came late in the Games, it had been at the hands of the Gamemakers, not another Tribute.

"Do you think there was something between them?" I asked.

"I don't know. Haymitch told us that the Capitol killed his girlfriend within a few weeks of his winning the Quell. Maybe he started something with Scarlen…and then she was reaped."

"The fucking Capitol," I said under my breath.

"The fucking Capitol," she echoed.

We let the subject drop and were quiet until we reached her house.

"You baking tomorrow?" she asked.

"I think so," I said, wagering on the sleep syrup working for me so that I would not have nightmares that left me in some kind of a stupor. It wasn't a perfect system but it was starting to work. "Tomorrow a hunting day?"

She looked up at the sky.

"I think it's going to rain," she said softly, her eyes a million miles away.

I looked up at the sky, noting that it was mostly cloudless, but I took her at her word. She spent more time out in the natural world than I ever did and I trusted her intuition. Her hair picked up in the breeze and I really looked at her for the first time that evening.

"Your hair isn't braided," I said.

She placed her hand on the back of her head like she had forgotten something.

"You are noticing this now?" she asked, pretending to be hurt.

"It looks nice," I said lamely. "Pretty," I amended.

"Thanks." She looked down but the corner of her mouth turned up in a smile. "So if it rains you can come over tomorrow morning. I still have some venison."

"Sure," I said, my eyes returning to the cloudless sky. "Sounds nice."

I left her at her doorstep and headed home, looking forward to my bed and hopefully dreamless sleep.

I woke up the next morning to a bright sunrise. The sky had remained clear and it looked like it was going to be a nice day after all. I showered and dressed before descending the stairs into the kitchen.

Two hours later there was a knock on the door.

"Come in," I called, not wanting to put down the dough I was getting ready to roll out.

The door opened and Katniss entered.

"Hey, I thought you'd be hunting. It's a beautiful day."

When she got into the kitchen I could see that her face was cloudy.

"What's wrong?"

"Nightmares."

I set down the dough and wiped my hands in on my apron. I took her by the arm and led her to the table. We sat in silence for close to a minute. She was looking down at her hands and I was watching her face. Finally she looked at me, a line between her brows.

"Who did that to you?" she asked.

"Did what?"

"This," she said, and she placed her hand on my chest near the scar where the port had been. I fought the urge to flinch away.

It was my turn to be silent for a while. I had never discussed Dr. Whyte with anyone other than Dr. Turner. It was almost like speaking her name gave her more power, but I knew that was absurd.

"It was a woman…a doctor. Her name was Dr. Whyte."

Katniss's jaw worked and I could see angry tears form in her eyes.

"What was she doing?" she asked through gritted teeth, but then her eyes went wide. "I'm sorry…you don't have to answer that."

"It's okay," I said, taking her hand and rubbing circles on her palm with my thumb. "I don't mind telling you right now…but I just don't want to have to talk about it again if that's okay."

She looked me in the eyes and nodded.

"You know why they used the venom on me…to alter my memories, right?"

She nodded.

"It was her job to find ways to get the venom into me," I said, indicating my chest with my other hand. "She also wanted to find out what memories would be the most useful to turn."

"So she asked you about me…about us."

"Yes…I mean from what I remember she asked a lot of questions. My memory of that time is pretty hazy. But I think that she must have had information from the Games. She used those the most."

"To make you think that I tried to hurt you," she said, her voice breaking on the word 'hurt.'

I squeezed her hand a little.

"But I know now that none of it is true," I said softly. "Katniss…we have to keep moving forward. Please…I know this is scary stuff. It still messes with me sometimes. But we are getting better. Forward is our only option."

A tear escaped her eye but she swiped it with her hand.

"Okay," she said, heaving a sigh and forcing a slight smile. "Forward."

Her eyes suddenly grew hard and bright. "But I would kill that bitch if I could."

Odd emotions flooded me. She looked like a lioness when she said it, so fierce and dangerous, that I had little doubt that if Dr. Whyte was in the room Katniss would make quick work of her demise. It made me feel protected which was something that I hadn't really felt before, or at least not in a long time.

But the thought of Katniss being in the same space as Dr. Whyte also filled me with a kind of dread. It made me feel their polarities…my greatest love in close proximity with my greatest hate. It was like two planets on a collision course. I forced my mind away from the idea of it.

I gave her hand another squeeze. I didn't know what to say so I just nodded my head. I let go of her hand and stood up, returning to my workspace.

"I have to finish getting this bread ready for the oven. Are you going to go hunting?"

"No…not today," she said, looking out the window and seeming lost in her thoughts.

"Well do you want me to teach you how to make something?" I indicated the dough with my hands.

She looked at me, her eyes softening a little.

"That sounds kind of fun actually," she said lightly, sounding a bit surprised.

"Well I doubt it will be as fun for you as traipsing through the woods all day, but I like it."

"I don't traipse Peeta," she said with mock condescension, "it scares the game."

"Well you'll have to show me sometime."

She looked at me then with a real smile on her lips.

"I will."

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