Hello, all! I wanted to thank my fabulous beta and friend, SolasVioletta for her wonderful work with this chapter. I don't ever get tired of telling everyone how great she is.
I am behind on responding to reviews (as I have been since school started) but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate each one of you. I have some reviewers who have been with me since day one and I adore you completely and utterly.
HG Fanfic Rec: Mind the Gap by Shiwiprincess. It's her first fanfiction but her writing voice is strong. She takes our favorite couple and places them in some of the toughest neighborhoods in London. It promises to be a great read.
Also, I Found You by michelle1039 is a unique take on Mockingjay and Peeta's hijacking. Both of these fics are written by two wonderful British writers and they are both a treat to read.
I deviated from canon just a little bit on this one. Hope you forgive me!
Chapters 28 is one of three parts. I hope you enjoy!
Chapter 28 Acts of Kindness (Part I)
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing
inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
- From Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
I was adamant about not watching the replay of our interview, sure that it had been a disaster. That very night I had such terrible nightmares – dreams of dead people walking, haunting the dust and stones of the Seam, children alight like small candle flames, luminous in their destruction. And in the end was Prim, her baby-face the same one I'd left the day I'd volunteered for the Games, eyes slanted in accusation. But they were not her eyes but those of the terrible mutt-painting Peeta had destroyed the day I disappeared into the woods. The gleam of hatred that glinted in those sky blue eyes was imprinted on my eyelids for days afterwards. The terrors were so persistent, neither Peeta nor I could sleep, causing both of us to drag our way through the following workdays. Despite those garish nights and arduous days, oblivious customers came in for days afterwards congratulating me for speaking the truth about District 12. Many were nothing if not offended on my behalf at the way Prim was brought up to get a dramatic rise out of me. It was almost universally determined that the reaction Giulia Aulis wanted was not the one she got. They could not have imagined that instead of triumph, that interview had pushed me towards a precipice and I clawed and scraped with every bit of my will to keep from going over the edge.
Still, to my chagrin, the interview garnered some of the highest ratings in the history of Hello, Panem! and landed Giulia Aulis at the center of many commentaries. However, it was the condition of war-torn districts that began to receive coverage and, as difficult as that interview was to give, its consequences were not unwelcomed if it meant that the plight of poorer districts began to receive the attention it deserved.
In the days following the interview, I tried to distract myself from the yawning abyss that was growing inside of me by throwing myself into the bakery. The Harvest Festival was fast approaching and it seemed everyone in District 12 wanted bread. Those who were better off, volunteers and the handful of townspeople who had not been wiped out from the firebombing, requested pies and other treats while most everyone else was in search of extra bread for the small meals they would have with their families and closest friends. It would not be a festive occasion – if anything in District 12 had ever truly been festive. With all the sparks of rebirth taking place, there were still too many spirits paying visits to homes buried in the heat of winter hearths.
If I was honest with myself, I knew that I did not regret my words. It burned me that under the glare of the Capitol's cameras, we were all meant to dust ourselves off, plaster on a crooked smile and perform like good marionettes for the satisfaction of a faceless audience. Didn't Capitol children explode alongside my Prim? Didn't Capitol citizens also die in the war? Were they already prepared to anaesthetize all of that loss and human suffering with yet another bit of empty programming, a collective suspension of disbelief? No, my words, once said, could not be recanted.
But in saying them, I had unleashed a kind of knowing that I could not undo. I had been so completely immersed in rebuilding my life with Peeta, I did not chance a very deep look at the circumstances around me. I knew, in an intellectual way, that there were Seam residents still struggling to rebuild after entire families had been wiped out. But somehow, that realization had not penetrated the halo surrounding my own personal life until the interview. I began to suspect that the world had not fundamentally changed; the Capitol still wanted a show and the poorest citizens still lived in misery. All the bloodshed and dead babies in the world did not seem powerful enough to change the course of human events.
I felt myself slowing down – the frenetic energy I had in excess to get the bakery established seemed to dissipate like the foggy breath that expands in winter air until its heat escapes and is no more. Peeta did not notice the ossification of my will, so engrossed was he with the endless minutiae of a well-run bakery. When his hands reached for me at night, I feigned sleep. Even his warm body could not entice me into any feelings of excitement. I was sinking slowly and I was only partially aware of my drowning. Everything became my enemy – the clock that ticked too slowly towards evening and the refuge on my bed, the calendar that sped too quickly toward that one day of the year that I had been dreading and forcibly keeping from the surface of my awareness. Things were converging on me and all I wanted to do was ball myself up against it until it passed.
One day, restless with an unnamed need, I left the bakery at noon under the pretense of running errands, and wandered the length and breadth of District 12. I traveled the Seam, seeing charred homes and rubbled streets, families who, though having more to eat than under the previous regime, still could not call themselves comfortable. Children wrapped in whatever extra clothes could be found shivered as they played on the steps of their dilapidated homes. There was the odd chicken coop; scrawny hens huddled against the cold and piles of damp wood that would need a week to dry before they would be any good for burning in the simple stone hearths of the tiny homes. There was no electricity here so many homes relied on paraffin for the primitive lamps that were common in the days before the Revolution. I thought of our home in the Village, a home so vast that Peeta and I could be lost in its spaces and yet, between both of us we had two. A Seam home would fit in one room of ours.
To be fair, there was some temporary housing – little wooden mini-homes for the truly destitute. These could run with electricity but there were too few houses here to make electricity available so their tiny chimneys spewed smoke into the afternoon sky. This, together with the weekly Capitol rations for the needy were probably keeping many of these residents from starvation. In confirmation of this, here and there were collapsed boxes with the new National Seal – a version of my Mockingjay – but they were damp from the snow and partially collapsed, looking half-melted in the slushy dirt. I saw some evidence of gardens around the small homes, though winter had reduced them to dried vines and cracked mounds of earth.
I continued on my way, heading North towards the Upper Quarter, past the ruins of the now abandoned mines. Soon I would be on paved streets again. It was there that I saw the familiar building that once housed the mine offices. I pulled up short, awash in the strange feeling that the line that had dragged me through the Seam somehow ended there. It was a fairly old building, square and utilitarian in design. The windows were shiny where the shutters were not closed. Perched on the edge where the dirt roads leading from the Seam rolled up to the concrete of the town center, the solid entrance of the building faced its less affluent neighborhood as if it had been planted accidentally on the paved side of the town.
I hesitated at the steps, my eyes captivated by the new placard, its crisp shininess in stark contrast to the dark wood of the building, stained with age, coal dust and ash. It read "District 12 Community Home." Of course. The town orphanage. The original one was destroyed in the firebombing and so it was clearly moved here to this spot. Though starvation and disease often took children before their time, there were those children who had the even worse destiny of ending up in the Community Home. There was no need to listen to the stories of neglect and abuse that were whispered through the town. It was enough to see these children in school, haggard and bruised, wearing clothes that were often too big or too small for them, some just rags falling from their backs. The chances of survival for those children were slimmer yet than for those in the Seam, if that was at all possible. One of the reasons why I learned to hunt and shut myself off from all society after the death of my father was precisely to keep Prim and I from meeting this terrible fate.
I had no good reason to linger and yet I could not just leave. Curiosity compelled drove me forward so I walked around the building, trying to peek into one of the windows. Inside was a long table set with meager bowls of soup. There was a remarkable lack of animation considering the approximately 20 bedraggled pre-teen and teenage children sitting around the long tables. A stern group of four women were engaged in various tasks as the children seemed to whisper quietly to each other, one woman ladling soup while another one steadied the cart that held the pot. A third woman bustled about, making sure that there were spoons and cups at each seat and the fourth and final woman was trying to make space at the end of the table for a young girl in a wheel chair.
There was a desperate one-sidedness to many of the conversations, the listener appearing to give very little response to the speaker. There was a dead look in the eyes of some of these children that penetrated the expanse of cold air, shimmering through the window pane and seizing my chest with frigid fingers.
I don't know why, but as I backed away from the window, my heart began pounding in my chest. I became less and less interested in my surroundings as I continued East and then South to return to the bakery. I had spent far more than the hour I had estimated and sure enough, as I nudged the back door that lead into the kitchen, Peeta looked up from his labors, his eyebrows raised in askance. This was completely understandable as I had returned with hands as empty as when I'd left. I didn't even try to keep up the pretense of my supposed errands. I just shrugged at him as I washed my hands and donned an apron.
I pushed through the rest of the day, my mind on my work only half the time. I was a jumble of thoughts and feelings that I could not align with any congruity. I desperately longed for the solitude of the woods. We had since moved our things back to Victor's Village so we wound up our day with a walk in the ever darkening afternoon but this afternoon, instead of going home, I lead Peeta to the gated entry to my woods.
"Where are we going?" he asked.
He pulled me back from my teeming thoughts and I scrambled for a moment before answering. "I just wanted to walk in the woods before it got dark. Are you up to it?" I teased but my note hit a false note.
He nodded but looked warily at me. "What's on your mind? You've been distracted the whole day."
"I'll tell you as soon as I know myself. I promise." I grasped his hand tightly as we walked. We lapsed into silence as my thinking went around and around. Peeta was a perfect companion, leaving me to my thoughts. I kept thinking of the children on the steps of their homes, shivering in their hand-me-downs. I saw the dead look in the eyes of those orphans. I thought about the rubble in the Seam, the collapsed mines, the well-paved streets of the center. Too soon, sunset came upon us and we headed back to our house.
As we entered our home, Peeta set about stoking the fire place as I warmed dinner. I looked around the house as if it were an alien thing. I had become attached to this house – it was Peeta's and my home and it had been our constant companion this last year and yet it felt like I was in the wrong place. I felt Buttercup walking between my legs, mewling in that raspy way he had. He was not the most affectionate animal in the world but he was a positive kitten when it came to eating in winter. Hunting was tough in the cold so he wisely buttered me up to get me to feed him and I thought how lucky he was to feel so little.
Setting the table, I heard Peeta's loud footsteps when he entered the kitchen. Soon his arms were encircling me from behind and I instinctively leaned into him. I'd worried him. Just as I feared his flashbacks, so he feared my withdrawals, those excursions that I made into darkness and depression. I felt the cold, deadened lump of my heart and longed for him to thaw it out. Setting down the spoon I was holding, I turned around in his arms and kissed him, winding my arms around his neck and pulling him into me. The nagging unhappiness that had been plaguing me quieted somewhat. Soon I was only aware of him, his snug thermal shirt clinging to his solid arms and shoulders, his fingers against my back. When we broke off our kiss, we were both a bit breathless. I wanted to leave dinner on the table, to escape the gnawing emptiness and so began to tug at the belt buckle of his pants when suddenly his stomach gave a deep growl, causing him to chuckle at himself. This served to definitively squelch that other hunger. Smiling sheepishly, I dropped my hand and we sat down to our meal instead.
After a few moments, Peeta looked squarely at me with an air of expectation. He had a studied air of calm but the tension gathered around his eyes, making that confounding blue shine with searching intensity. I glanced down at my bowl before bringing my eyes up to his again.
"Persistent, aren't we?" I joked with forced cheerfulness.
"You know me." He said simply, but in that way of his that made his words have more than one meaning. He was asking me to trust him. To confide in him. To share my burdens with him.
Taking a deep breath, I gave in to his curiousity. "I took a walk around District 12 today. I wanted to see how things were."
He looked at me quizzically. "So what did you see?"
I began to describe my walk through the Seam, past the coal mines and ending finally with the orphanage. I had his full attention as I told him about the children I'd seen inside.
"There were no babies." I realized suddenly.
"No, there probably wouldn't be." Peeta said seriously as he cleared the table and set himself back down next to me.
Now it was my turn to look at him. "Why does that not surprise you?"
"Those are the District 12 orphans that probably came back from District 13. They would have wanted to keep the young ones but it's hard to place older children. That has always been the problem with the community homes, right? Either the younger ones die or they are adopted but once they get older, I think no one wants them."
This distressed me to no end and that unhappy feeling came back to me. It must have been written all over my face because Peeta's brows furrowed. "Are you okay?"
I shrugged, trying to be nonchalant. "It just seems so unfair. It's like for a lot of these people, nothing has really changed. They are a little bit better fed but they're so cold. And those kids. They probably lost all of their family during the war or never even had anyone. Then came the firebombing, going to a strange new District. The fighting. It must have been so scary for them."
Without warning, tears pushed their way out of my eyes. "Peeta, it doesn't change. Everything we lost was for nothing."
The sinking feeling overcame me and I was suddenly breathless with the enormity of the pain and unhappiness inside of me, as if water had replaced air and I was gulping in what I could not breathe. Peeta's face blanched in fear and soon he was next to me.
"Katniss, what is this?" he asked, gathering me up to him but he knew what it was and knew that, like his flashbacks, he had no real power to stop it. But, being who we are, it never kept us from trying. "Please, don't do this. Not again."
I shook my head and whispered into his chest. "Peeta, it will be a year soon. You know that? A year since she left." I felt that immobility take hold of me. I couldn't ignore it any longer – it was stronger than me. "For no good reason. She's gone." I stood suddenly, unable to endure anything, not the air in the house, the soft cushion of my seat, the smell of dinner that now provoked nausea in me, even Peeta's skin on mine. I kissed Peeta on the cheek – it was the least I could do. Then, without a word, I walked upstairs, pausing to strip down to my underwear before slipping under the blankets. I sunk into the heart of the dark earth, no longer seeing or hearing Peeta's foot falls, or feeling his hand on my braid. His words washed over me without comprehension, the pleading, desperate tone in his voice the only thing that penetrated my pain-addled brain. But I had no more energy remaining to reach back to him. Instead, I was falling into familiar darkness. This is what it is like to die.
XXXXX
I marked the passage of time by the movement of light outside of the partially opened curtain. When it was night, the light disappeared and the bed behind me sagged as Peeta tried to gather me to him. I was now stone where my once malleable body would mold itself to him. He whispered things in my ear, sometimes sweet, sometimes insistent and wet – he delivered his messages bathed in tears but I could not move out of my cocoon. He was so far away and there was no part of me that wanted to reach him. This realization pushed me deeper into myself.
Time passed as I drifted in and out of sleep. When I lost consciousness I dreamed of her dying over and over. She was not forgiving me this. None of it. And worse, it was for nothing and she did not forgive that either. I woke in a cold sweat, being held and rocked, my throat dry and hoarse from screaming but as soon as the waking world reached me, I sunk back into my inert self, balled on my side. I sensed food and water but locked my mouth against it. I smelled the cloud of stale alcohol and heard a murmuring brush of fingers against my cheeks, a raspy, deep voice calling me with a familiar name but I was too far down the tunnel, where Prim and her host of dead waited on the other side.
Soon it was a rustling of a coat, an unfamiliar sterile smell that seemed to jar me for a moment. A pale face framed in dark hair, the cold press of a stethoscope, the easy puncturing of the skin of my arm. I heard the chattering of voices around me but I did not want them so I pretended that they were insect wings buzzing in my ear and burrowed deeper into my spot. Then all became silent and I released the tension in my body, poking my head out to continue my contemplation of the crack near the window sill.
I was in a half-doze when I heard the latch of the bedroom door turn quietly. The sound penetrated the fog of darkness like the diffuse light of a distant searchlight. I thought back to a picture in one of my schoolbooks of a lighthouse perched over a rocky outcropping in the sea, its light attempting to pierce through dense ocean mists, scattered but just perceived by the lonely fishing boat floating askew in the waters.
Steps followed after but they were not Peeta's heavy steps and somehow, this tiny distortion of my expectation caused me to root myself in the present moment. The walking sound was the click, click of lighter feet on fine heels. I knew of only one person who wore such shoes and would take such liberties in my house. I hunkered lower under the sheets, hoping that my body would convey the lack of desire for any company.
The movement stopped momentarily. Perhaps she was taking in the room, the immobile form lying limp yet tense under a pile of thick blankets. Her pause seemed interminable, such that I began to forget her presence when she moved again around the bed to sit next to me. I cracked my eyes open ever so slightly to see her peering down at me with her lovely pastel blue eyes, a gentle expression on her face. She sat for another bit next to me, studying me as if I were the most interesting thing she had ever seen. She then lifted her head to examine the bedroom, nodding to herself in satisfaction.
"I love this green color. The furniture shows nicely against this shade. You matched it very well to this comforter. You know, colors tell a story about people. I've always paid attention to that because I've had to draw conclusions about people based on what they surrounded themselves with." Effie waved her small hand as she described the rooms only she could see. "Cluttery spaces with dense, rich colors indicate a thoughtful, if disorganized mind. Bright colors and spare rooms are for the very ambitious, as if they couldn't be bothered with putting anything more into their living spaces. But beware anyone who favors too much white – in my experience, that never promised anything good."
I thought right away to Snow's white flowers, Coins white rooms in District 13 and all the hospital rooms in which I'd ever been. She was right – white was not a color you could live in.
"You and Peeta have decorated this house with oranges, greens and yellows. To me, those are the colors of life. The green with the wood furniture obviously calls to mind your place in the woods. The orange must belong to Peeta – like the sun – warm and giving. I could say the same for the yellow but there is too much of it to be inconsequential. What does it mean, Katniss? What is the story of that color?" She asked gently.
I don't know why, but I suddenly wanted to speak to her.
"Dandelions." I whispered.
"Dandelions?" she looked at me quizzically.
I took a deep breath, my voice hoarse from lack of use. "The day Peeta gave me the bread, I thought that my family would starve to death. There was no food and hadn't been for a while and I had nowhere left to go. I was searching garbage cans and was near the bakery when his mother ran me off. You know, he burned that bread on purpose?"
"On purpose? I remember you talking about it in the cave." she asked.
"Yes. He'd seen me, saw the shape I was in and burned the bread. His mother beat him because of it but he managed to toss the loaf to me anyway. I went home after that and we ate like we hadn't in days." I paused, lost in the memory.
She remained quiet, waiting for me to continue. I shifted in the bed so that my head slipped out completely from the comforter. She simply reached out and gently pushed the hair from where it had stuck to my forehead.
"The next day, I wanted to thank him. But when I saw his bruised face, I couldn't speak and I never did thank him until years later, the Games." I sat up in the bed now, leaning against the headboard. "I was such a coward." I said bitterly.
"But in the school yard, I saw a blooming dandelion. I picked it up and right away went home to get a bucket. Prim and I went to the meadow and picked every single last one that we could find. That night, we ate what remained of the bread and the flowers, stems and all. That was when I decided that we just might live after all."
Effie looked at me with large eyes, overcome by some feeling I could not quite recognize. "So the yellow represents the first meal you had after you were sure you would die?" she said.
"No, the yellow for me is the dandelion that gave me hope. And to me, Peeta is my dandelion. He is my hope." My voice caught at the end and I lapsed into ragged silence.
The tears that I had not shed slid quietly down Effie's cheeks. To her credit, she did not sob or descend into histrionics. Instead, she wiped them gently from her cheeks and took a deep, shaky breath. We sat like this for a long while, lost in our thoughts. When she finally spoke, she surprised me with what she said.
"When I was in that awful Capitol prison, I thought for sure I would die. They hardly fed me and woke me at all hours of the night to interrogate me. I didn't sleep for at least a week. They tried in every way to pry information I did not have, first using persuasion, then depriving me of sleep and food and finally, beating me." she shivered and instinctively looked over her shoulder as she said this, as if they were coming to take her away at that moment.
"You have to understand. I had always been a daddy's girl. No one had ever put a hand on me in my life. Not even when my father was cross with me, he never touched me. I was ready to die at the first slap. You can imagine afterwards, I just wanted to dissolve into the ground. I would have made things up if only I could avoid that experience again but it didn't stop them from coming back and doing it again, for several nights. Luckily, I had friends who vouched for my loyalty and I was released a few weeks later." She looked down at her hands in shame, as if she shouldn't have had those friends.
"I was in a terrible state when I was released. Every sound I heard made me jump. I dreamed of my nights in the cell. Because I was being monitored, I knew my paranoia at being followed was not exaggerated. I saw them everywhere and couldn't eat anymore. I went to a doctor who prescribed medication that made me throw up every day. Terrible things, those pills. I was starting to lose my girlish figure." She unconsciously ran her hand over her stomach. "I couldn't look at myself in the mirror anymore. I didn't know what had happened to you or Peeta or Haymitch. People I had never imagined would be of any interest to the government were suddenly gone, and no one would say where they had gone. Were they arrested? Had they gone off to fight for the rebels? Everyone I knew was afraid to speak."
She took my hand at this point and held it in her small, warm ones. "I felt so alone, abandoned by everyone who I thought was important to me. So, I played a game with myself. Every time I was hopeless, paranoid or afraid, I began to think of all the good things that I had seen done for me or for someone else. At first, I was in such a state, I couldn't think of much but then, I remembered when I was small and had fallen terribly ill, how my parents had sat up with me the whole night until I was better. There was a friend of mine who collected the most fabulous shoes. She had so many, she went into debt to get the latest ones. She loved me so much, she lent me her best pair of Vesuvius pumps so that I could attend a fashion show." She smiled at the memory. "I remembered a certain person apologizing to me profusely after she thought she had offended me on the Victory Tour, just to preserve my feelings."
"Didn't I hurt your feelings, though?" I asked, riveted by the words that tumbled from her mouth, words I never thought she was capable of.
"At the time, you did because I was a very silly thing. But I also know that you do not apologize very often. If you did it, it was because you wanted me to feel better. That was a little gift in itself." She smiled as she rubbed my hand. "I remembered when Finnick saved Peeta's life in the Arena. To my eyes, it was the most miraculous thing I had ever seen. I think I aged ten years when I saw him on that ground, unmoving." Here her tears flowed unchecked. "You see, Katniss, the world can be a terrible, evil place but it is populated by people who give and love and you have to really cling to these things. And I have never seen anyone love so well as you. Collect these little miracles so when you are in your dark place, they will keep you from staying there. Try it. What can you name?"
I was so enraptured, I did not feel my own tears until they bathed my cheeks. "I..ah…I remember when my father gave me my first bow. I was five and understood what I was getting something important. Peeta tossed me that bread which saved my life. Gale shared his haul with my family even though he had so many mouths to feed. My mother when she woke up from her depression and asked me every night how I wanted the food that I brought cooked. She tried her best to make the things I liked. Rue telling me about the tracker jacker nest so that I could escape the careers. Haymitch's parachutes. Finnick saving Peeta. Greasy Sae taking care of me." I straightened up in my bed. "I guess I could go on."
"You can because there is a lot of good in the world. You just have to see it." She smiled sadly at me.
"You sound like Peeta. He sees good everywhere." I smiled, perhaps for the first time in days.
Effie released my hands and smoothed the blankets unconsciously. "He's waiting for you, you know. Downstairs. I've been at the bakery these last few days." I began to apologize profusely but she wouldn't hear of it. "Nonsense, I enjoyed being the boss for a little while. I run a tight ship, you know. I even managed to drag Haymitch in to help, though I wouldn't let him touch the food until he'd scrubbed himself up to his elbows." Effie blushed a bit. "And you'll never know who came three days in a row to buy a bear's claw for his son."
I perked up at this. "Who?"
Effie dropped her voice, becoming herself in the way she whispered it. "The Mayor."
My sharp intake of breath, together with her way of confessing made me feel lighter. "The Mayor? Effie…"
"Shhh, yes! We chatted for quite a bit. He even waited for customers to be served. He told me he missed our lunches and needed to see me." She giggled.
"Lunches? Have you been on dates with him? Do you like him?" I asked.
"A few dates. Nothing exotic. This is District 12, after all." She chuckled at this. "I'm not sure how much I like him. He is a calming person and very kind but I'm out of practice with men. He is also so recently widowed."
"Effie, it's been more than a year." I couldn't believe I was having this conversation with her.
"Yes, but it was a traumatic loss. Those types of things are not so easily overcome." She stated wisely. "What about you? With Peeta? You already live like a married couple and you're engaged. Maybe it's time to take the next step?"
I froze at this. I couldn't even think of that. The thought of marrying Peeta, as much as I loved him, suddenly made me nauseous with fear. Effie saw my expression and quickly attempted damage control. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up. That's between the two of you." She twittered nervously.
"No, it's okay." I whispered. I felt we had broken through some barrier and I trusted her with my feelings. "It's complicated. The last time we discussed marriage, it was with all of Panem watching us. There was so much pressure." I paused, uncomfortable with my feelings. "I want that to belong only to us. And then…"
Effie cocked her head to the side, listening intently.
"If something happened to him…to my husband…" I rolled the word around in my mouth.
Effie brought her hands up to her mouth. "Katniss, do you think that not marrying him would make losing him somehow less tragic? Do you think it would destroy you any less?" she asked with such kindness that it made me want to put my head on her lap and let her take care of me.
I thought for a moment and shook my head. "Probably not. It's irrational but I would have more to lose."
"Peeta would still be Peeta, whether he is your husband or not. I don't think you are protecting yourself from anything if you avoid being his wife."
We sat in silence, her words hanging like shiny ornaments in the middle of the room.
Effie abruptly straightened up. "Now, I must insist that you allow me to help you out of this bed and into something a bit more…" she looked me up and down. "…presentable. You can't let your public see you in this way! It's just not acceptable." she sniffed.
I smiled at the familiar roles and embraced my place as her charge. "I'm ready."
Pulling me out of bed, she shuffled with her very prim walk to the bathroom to run the shower. "As usual, I certainly have my work cut out for me."
Come visit me at tumblr: titania522. Chapter 29 will be up very soon!
