Chapter 1: Love Buries Alive
I cough and wretch as I crouch and wriggle through the tight spaces after Bristel and Ripper, my partners on our digging crew. It might be logical, but it's still sexist, to partner up all the female miners together as buddies, even with how few of us there are. Ripper, who used to sell hard moonshine in the Hob before it burned and can only dig with one good arm, and Bristel, who I know is fucking Gale Hawthorne, one of the Foremen. They are the only two women, other than me, working down in the mines. Mining has only really been seen as "man's work," and the few women who have ever been down the shafts are divorced, widowed, separated or just unmarried. Only the most desperate women who can't provide for themselves otherwise venture down here.
I've been relegated to canary duty today. Every pair or threesome on a digging crew is required to have at least one canary in a cage and on hand. The canaries sing up until the point where it is no longer save to breathe. By that point, the canary is dead… and if you don't get out, so will you.
I still take turns with Ripper on the pickaxe, though – the poor woman does only have one arm, and it doesn't seem fair that the woman with the disability doesn't get a more bearable job like holding the stupid bird in its stupid cage.
Suddenly, I spot Thom, one of the supervisors, squirm into the cavern where my girlfriends and I are working, followed by another male body. Flashes of white skin tell me the newcomer has just come down from the lifts, but the soot won't stay away for long. He'll be coated in it within the hour.
"Everdeen!" Thom calls. "We have a new recruit. I'm putting him on your crew!"
When the new arrival lifts his cobalt eyes to mine, my heart nearly stops. I nearly scream, but that would trigger a false alarm of an imminent collapse and cause a stampede for the lifts. The young man just gazes back at me, his handsome face grim but determined.
Peeta Mellark is the youngest son of the Baker in Town. He and I were classmates in school up until graduation a few weeks ago, though we never spoke at all. Honestly, I probably would have dropped out of school and taken this job down the shafts a lot sooner if the district law hadn't expressly forbade anyone younger than 18 working in the mines. I finally became a legal adult this past May 8th, close to a month ago.
I also know Peeta Mellark for one other reason, and it's something that I resent him for: soon after my Daddy died in a mine collapse when I was eleven, my mother, my baby sister Prim and I were close to death. On a cold and rainy day, I had stopped underneath a tree just outside the Bakery and simply waited to die. All at once, there had been a commotion and the Baker's youngest son had come out under the abusive screams of his mother. He had been carrying two loaves of burned bread.
We locked eyes, blue on Seam grey, for just a moment before Peeta had finally glanced away, shuffled over to the muddy pigpen and tossed both loaves to the pigs before shuffling back inside. I hadn't exactly been prepared to take the risk of fighting hogs over scraps, so I had turned away. Somehow, I had managed to crawl back to my home in the Seam alive. To this day, I'm still not sure how.
So began seven years of pathetic scavenging, digging through rubbish pins. I've provided for my family, if only just barely, and maybe I've been caught dumpster diving by the Peacekeepers more often than not, but now that I finally have a steady-paying job, I can bring in coin for my mother and sister and we can buy real food, whatever we can afford.
It's not like I have a choice.
I find myself glowering at Peeta Mellark with something that might be hatred as I think of what has passed between us – or, more accurately, what didn't pass between us. I've never been one to hold a grudge in the same way that I always feel indebted to a kindness shown. Except this boy has never shown any kindness to me.
"Newbie?" I grunt to Thom, who is reaching around me to pass a second canary cage over to Bristel.
"Yup. I'm splitting you ladies' threesome. Though I'm sure you guys would appreciate getting a real man in there anyway!" He waggles his eyebrows suggestively, and I scowl at him. Peeta Mellark doesn't look like much of a man to me, his bulging muscles – which I can see even buried under the layers of a coal miner's uniform – aside. Green as he is, I don't expect him to last the month.
"Fine. Ripper, you can take this one..."
"Oh, no, Everdeen. He's your problem now!" And Thom shoves Peeta into me with a laugh.
The klutz nearly falls on top of me in these tight quarters, and I have to brace myself against his strong arms to hold him back. We both seem to freeze at that moment, and I can't help but gaze into his eyes... eyes that, even down here, are as blue as a summer sky...
I twist away, glaring, and taking Peeta by the hand, drag him out of this tunnel and into another one. I wave lamely back towards my girlfriends as I flounce away.
Peeta is quiet, silent and respectful as I show him how to wield the pickaxe. I remain on canary duty and watch his back from behind as he chips away at the ore. We advance into this tunneled out crevice at a glacial pace.
After I spend a few minutes getting a wonderful view of his buttocks, the muscles of his glutes rippling as he lunges, surges forward to hack away, I manage to grunt out, "Why are you down here, anyway?"
He pauses in his chipping to wriggle back and turn to look at me. I am struck by how quickly his face has covered itself in soot... and yet the bright blue shade of his eyes have not lost their color.
"Mom kicked me out once I finished school. Between three sons, only one of us stands to inherit the Bakery. Brann has already moved out to work for the blacksmith, so the Bakery automatically goes to Rye. As the youngest... I was just out of luck."
I vaguely know of his middle brother – he was the district champion in wrestling at school, and Peeta, the runner-up. In the grade ahead of us, I had always thought Rye to live up to his reputation of being a clown. It's a shame he gets the Bakery by virtue of birthright. I have a feeling Peeta would have done a better job of managing it. Instead, he's down here, pretty much cast out on his own to fend for himself.
My mother and sister may not have cast me out, yet somehow, I still empathize with the feeling. "I'm sorry," I murmur softly.
We share an oddly charged look for a long moment before Peeta glumly nods and turns back to our work.
He may have been a stingy bastard when we were children, but I can safely say that he is a hard worker. I enjoy watching him work.
I don't even mind the view of his ass so much.
It gets harder to stay mad at Peeta over the missed opportunity with the bread as our days of working together drag on. I do stay mum, however, preferring to work instead of engaging in idle chat. Even so, I find myself staring at him more and more as he attacks the iron ore with gusto. I feel something acidic gnaw at me whenever I do. It isn't right that he's down here, where the job is dangerous and any day down the shafts could be your last. He should be up there, doing what he loves, baking bread. Decorating the cupcakes that Prim would often drag me to oooh and ahhh over in the display windows, her sunken cheeks and pleading eyes wishing we could have just one.
Of course, I can't be sure, but from watching Peeta work these past few weeks, how he wields the pickaxe with an almost graceful sort of care that has led to some teasing from the other men, I wonder if it was his steady hand that decorated those little cakes with all the icing.
He turns back abruptly and catches me staring, and I shrink back, heat blooming onto my cheeks even underneath the layer of coal dust.
Peeta frowns. "Will you quit it?"
I match the way his lip curls. "Quit what?"
"Staring at me like I'm wounded. So I can quit acting like it. Maybe then, we'd have a shot at being friends."
I flush prettily, biting my lip as I glance askance down at the dirt and rock under my free palm, the one not holding the canary cage aloft. "I've never been very good at making friends," I mumble.
When I dare to lift my gaze back to Peeta, his cobalt-blue eyes have softened. "Well..." he purses his lips before popping them. "It does help when you know the person. I hardly know anything about you except you're stubborn and can crawl as easily down here as you can through a dumpster."
I wince. "That about sums me up," I quip dryly, self-deprecatingly.
"Nah," Peeta chuckles, and his teeth are so white when he smiles, they are nearly blinding. Of course they would be, as one of the few parts of us down here that wouldn't get covered in soot. You always have to be careful never to breathe too much in. I have to concede that I rather like his smile. It's... luminous. Like his eyes. "There's more than that; you just don't want to tell me."
I open my mouth to retort, but can only splutter. I can't really think of anything else about me that I could share – anything that is remotely interesting, anyway. Peeta shakes his head. He seems almost amused. "See, Katniss, the way the only friendship thing works is you have to tell each other... the deep stuff."
"The deep stuff?" I can't help but smirk back. "Uh oh – like what?"
"Like... what's your favorite color?"
"Well, now you've stepped over the line," I deadpan. "And anyway, didn't you know?: it's gray!" We both share a laugh over my facetiousness.
"No, seriously though, what is it?"
I peer at him for several long, pregnant seconds. "Green. What's yours?"
"Orange," Peeta smiles back.
I scoff. "Like Effie Trinket's hair?" A bit of coal dust goes up my nose and I cough. I sense Peeta reach out to me, maybe to rub my back, but he seems to think better of it. All I can envision behind my watering eyes is the way our Capitol escort for the Hunger Games wears ridiculously colored wigs every year.
"No, not that kind of orange. More like... more like a sunset kind of orange."
Sunset. I lick my lips, my throat having gone bone-dry, almost parched... and I have the strangest suspicion it's not due to how hot it can get down here, in the shafts. Peeta and I gaze at each other for a moment. The spell is finally broken when Peeta turns away and resumes chipping at the rock before Thom, our supervisor, circles back here on his rounds.
"Perfect," I whisper.
