For the rest of the week, I trade the crisp dawn air of the woods for mornings surrounded by the stifling heat of the bakery. Without my runs I find myself itchy. By midday my are muscles twitchy, aching to move and stretch and burn. But, for some reason, I feel calm when I'm actually in the bakery with Peeta. We bake in content silence; easing into a gentle dance of passing flour and nodding to egg washes, sliding trays into ovens and pulling them out.
On the Sunday we make our way to the Justice Building after finishing prep. Madge has commandeered a meeting room, and the long oak table is peppered with a dozen piles of brightly coloured manila folders, each bursting with papers. Johanna and Beetee offer a nod in good morning when we enter, but otherwise there's an odd tension in the room - an unspoken recognition that with the announcement of the Prosecution, the trial is no longer an abstract looming in a distant future. It's really starting; it'll will really happen.
"As you've heard, Plutarch will be heading up the Prosecution, supported by Gale, Brutus and Enobaria," Madge starts.
"They're some interesting choices insofar as optics - Plutarch being a Capitol boy and Career Victors having the reputation of being in the Capitol's pockets. Gale, now —"
I swallow roughly, a congealed glob of saliva at the back of my throat. No one makes a show of looking toward me though, and I'm grateful.
"— the optics of having him on the Prosecution are inarguably smart. He's come from hardship, was a key player in Thirteen, and is delivering for Twelve as a current leader. We can't underestimate the power of him simply being on the Prosecution."
Madge rises slightly from her chair and pushes groups of folders towards each of us.
"With both teams now announced, we can start going over these documents."
Jo lets out an exhausted sigh. Madge smirks, ever so slightly.
"This is our evidence. A document a day, people. I want us thinking about what stories these papers tell us about the war, and perhaps more importantly, what they don't tell us. I want you thinking not only about what these documents say to you, but what they may say to Plutarch, Brutus, Enobaria, Gale.
"What will they be seeing here? How will they be trying to use these documents to their advantage? How can we preempt their arguments and spin them? Think outside the box."
The papers make a soft thwack when I drop them on my dining table. I sit down tentatively. A document a day, I think. It shouldn't be hard.
Only these documents are from the war. They're diagrams and schematics. Brainstorms of offensives and defences and counters, from the Capitol and Thirteen alike. Strategies that I helped execute. Strategies that killed the people I love.
I make it through one sentence on the first page before I'm lurching to the bathroom and kneeling over the toilet, retching. My ribs spasm against the porcelain, and my forehead feels hot and clammy as I palm my hair away from my face. I bring up the remnants of my breakfast, but there's not much, so I spend much of the next half hour dry-retching; violent, guttural sounds echoing through the tiny bathroom.
The only thing that hits the toilet bowl are my tears. I watch as they ripple across the toilet water, and I sob harder.
I call Madge in the afternoon. It's past three; I was meant to be at Peeta's fifteen minutes ago.
"I can't go today, Madge."
Madge pauses.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah," I choke out. Even I can hear though how that one syllable screams that I'm not.
"What paper did you read?"
The label of the folder rumbles through my mind. My gut churns.
I can't tell Madge. The words aren't just stuck in my throat - they're stuck in my very being. The rebellion is a chunk of my life I've tried to lock away, so deep within myself that I don't even know how to access it. It's only in the woods that I allow memories to leak through ever so slightly - and only memories of Prim.
"I can't do the session, Madge."
Perhaps its the shake in my voice, or the way it cracks, but Madge doesn't question me.
"Take a couple of days Katniss. As many as you need. Peeta's brother is back on Wednesday anyway, and Jo can help at the bakery in the interim. Beetee sit in on the Town Hall with Haymitch too needed."
I sniff unwittingly. There's a pregnant pause down the line.
"Will you be alright, Katniss?" Madge asks.
"Yeah," I reply again, though this time, it sounds more confident. "Yeah."
Four minutes later, I'm at the fence. Nine minutes later I'm a kilometre into the woods. Forty nine minutes later, I'm still running, my lungs screaming, my legs shrieking, twigs and branches and thick brambles scratching at my skin.
I run, and I run, and I run.
The phone trills early the next day.
"Katniss?"
I haven't heard that voice call me by my name in a long time. There's a lump in my throat when I answer. I sound squeaky, like all the air has been compressed from my lungs.
"Hi, Jo."
"Madge has me doing your Bakery gig for a bit."
I don't respond.
"What folder did you start with?"
"The blue one."
I try to sound un-phased, as though Jo's question is a simple one, akin to asking what colour an apple is, or whether it's a cloudy day. I can hear the way my voice cracks though. I can hear my slight breathlessness. I know Jo can hear it to.
"Deployment records?"
I manage a small murmur of assent. Jo echoes it.
"I'm coming over for dinner tonight, yeah?"
"No, Jo —"
"Katniss. I'm coming over," she says.
I close my eyes. "Okay."
Jo arrives at six. She knocks on the door once but doesn't wait to be let in; it sweeps open with a bang. She walks straight to me without greeting and cups my cheeks in her palms, levelling me with a sharp gaze.
"We're not talking about the folders, yeah? Not tonight."
She doesn't wait for an answer either. Instead, she bypasses me, scooping up the piles of papers from the table and stalking to the far corner of the room. She drops them unceremoniously before shrugging off her jacket and laying it over them - as if the flimsy piece of fabric is enough to disguise them. She turns to me.
"Right then. Let's have some fun."
It's not the same as when Gale's here, when he tries to help cook. There's a casual-ness to the evening; Jo swiping cut carrots from the counter each time I look away, stuffing them in her mouth and laughing manically when I turn around, notice, and huff exasperatedly. It feels … young. I feel young. Like this is what you're supposed to do in your youth - spend time with friends just because. Fill time with purposeless chat just because. It's this floaty, airy feeling, like a weight off my chest and shoulders. This utter freedom of being in the present, with no expectations or challenges or responsibilities beyond not letting the potatoes boil too long.
At dinner, Jo doesn't bring up the Deployment Records, nor Gale, or even Peeta. Neither do I. It's a dance we've perfected of noticing what matters to the other, and then knowing when and where we can bring it up. Halfway through the dinner though, there's a slight shift from the joviality.
"Why are you still eating like that?" Jo asks.
I frown. I give my meat a gentle tug and it pulls away from the bone.
"What do you mean, 'eating like that'?" I say, parroting her flat tone mockingly, a slight grin on my face. She ignores me.
"Eating like we did before."
I furrow my brow, confused, and Jo sighs in exasperation as though I'm being obtuse.
"Eating like we did before the war. You know, rationing."
I pop the meat into my mouth and chew, trying to bide some extra time. Jo's stare doesn't break from me - she knows exactly what I'm doing.
"It's not conscious," I say, looking at my plate.
Jo's not wrong. It's more than I ate prior to the war, but compared to how others are eating now, it's still a half-empty plate. I shrug my shoulders and sigh, meeting Jo's eyes. They're soft.
"I don't get that hungry, Jo. Really. It's habit."
Jo pierces a carrot, plopping it into her mouth and shifting her attention to the window. She chews, ruminatively.
"I've got to disagree with you there," she says. "It was like that for me at the beginning, too. A bit of habit, and a bit of disgust, I guess, that I should have all this food while parents were still crying over the kids I killed."
She moves onto a piece of meat.
"But after a while, your appetite picks up. You can ignore it, sure, but the want, it's there. I've seen it in Seven too. First few months after the war, everyone's appetites went to shit. But it's been a year now Katniss. Most people are eating like they should be, or starting to." She levels her fork at me, "You're not."
I pause.
"Well —"
"You don't have to give me an answer," Jo interrupts. "I just wanted to ask if you'd thought about why. Because if you can't begin to unpack the why - if you find it makes you panicky, or like you just need to get out of here —"
"— Jo —"
"Just know I'm always here, okay?"
I'm here are my least favourite words. They make me itchy. They make me defensive. They make me think about who isn't here. When Jo says them though, eyes wide and earnest, I can't seem to summon my usual annoyance. I merely nod.
Jo studies me.
"You haven't called, you know," she says, and I know she's not just talking about the past weeks since she's arrived. It's not a spiteful tone, nor one laced with hurt. She says it plainly, because I haven't; called, written, sent message of any form. We've talked, of course, in the District meetings - quick hellos, passing goodbyes - but otherwise, we haven't been in touch.
I pierce a carrot and swirl it around my plate. "You haven't either," I mumble, earning a sharp bark of laughter. I peer up from the table, cautious, but her eyes are filled with mirth.
"I guess we're not the type to call, hey?" she says with a smile. "We should be though."
There's a lot of things people think we should be after the war; happy, compassionate, caring. And, if not, at the very least trying to be. For for the first time though, I find myself in agreement. The rest of the dinner is accompanied by a melody of gentle scrapings of cutlery against plates. Just before we get up to clear the dishes, I feel a soft kick at my shin.
"You know I love you, Brainless."
It's quick and soft. There's no hand holding, and Jo's scooted back from the table a mere second afterwards, sweeping cutlery into her arms and heading for the sink. But it makes me smile, softly, and my heart flutter. Ever so slightly, ever so quick.
When she leaves though, swiping her jacket from the corner, the papers are still there.
On Tuesday, I run.
On Wednesday, I run.
On Thursday, I run.
I fall into a dreamless sleep each night, but it's not peaceful. It's a heavy, inescapable sleep - like someone's pulled a thick blanket over me, and I can't move nor breathe properly until morning when they'll lift it.
On Friday, I'm making my way to the fence when I catch a glimpse of a tall figure at the far end of the road, heading into Town. My belly feels leaden when I see him, but somehow, unbidden, a light feeling spreads in my chest. A feeling of familiarity. Of home.
We're silent for a moment, trading gazes as if telepathically communicating. Sometimes, I think we can. Or rather, sometimes, I thought we could. I'm not as convinced anymore. The feelings in my gut and chest rage, pulling me one way and pushing me another. How do you reconcile the old with the new? What do you do when you realise that you're not on the same page with someone as you thought - that you may even be reading entirely different books?
"Catnip, about the case …"
My lips twist, a sour taste in my mouth, but I find myself shaking my head nonetheless. A slow and soft movement that tells Gale that I don't forgive him, that I don't agree with him, but I'm choosing to ignore the issue for now.
That's not exactly right, though. Under any other circumstances, I doubt I would thaw to Gale as quickly as I am. Hell, I'd probably have frozen him out until he backtracked. I'm not choosing to ignore Gale's opinions of Peeta - and what they say of his thoughts on the Rebellion and Coin more broadly.
Instead, I'm falling into that ignorance. Chasing it. Pleading with it to infect me - because ignoring the elephant in the room for now means that I can have Gale back. And for all his irksome bravado, his inflated ego, his self-assuredness that knows no bounds - I need him. He was there in the beginning, and he was there in the middle, and I need him now, here, in whatever 'end' state this is. If I have to read those wretched papers, I will need him with me - someone who knows what I have been through, and who has been through it with me.
"Agree to disagree," I mumble.
Gale cracks a small grin. "Kind of our job now, hey?"
Despite myself, a small smirk itches at the sides of my mouth. "Something like that."
He reaches out to squeeze my hand once, and his rough calloused hands feel like home.
"Want to go to the woods on Sunday?"
"Sure," I say. His smile is dazzling.
I don't make it to the woods.
After seeing Gale, I detour to the Hob, where I ask Ripper for a quart of her moonshine.
She cackles and slaps me on the shoulder.
"My girl, my girl," she laughs, pouring an amber liquid into a bottle. "Never thought I'd see the day, hey? Miss straight-as-an-arrow."
As I pass over some coins though her hands grasp mine, tight and urgent.
"You okay, girl?" She says softly.
I nod. "Yeah, Ripper. I'm alright."
I'm not a big fan of drinking. I can't get through a glass of anything without feeling the spins, and I hate the way my mouth tastes of sandpaper the morning after. I'm especially not a fan of drinking to numb pain. I tried it once, with Abernathy, when we first returned to Twelve. All I got from the experience was an ill stomach and a violent headache. I'd spent the next day in bed, stuck in a house I should've been sharing with Prim but wasn't; unable to escape to the woods.
Tonight, though? Tonight isn't so much as to numb as to galvanise.
A document a day.
I bang the cupboards when I get home. Boil the kettle. Pour a healthy dash of Ripper's brown liquor into a mug of coffee, then a splash more.
I sit at the table, take a swig, and swipe the first folder of the stack toward me. 'Deployment Records'. I open it, and the sheet that emptied my guts the other day stares back at me. I feel my stomach roil again - pinch and squeeze and scrunch. The sheet has ten lines of text and a map. I take another swig, and the liquor blazes a warm trail down my throat.
The sheet tells me the activity of Hovercraft ZA1 for a day two years ago; the last day of the last Games. It tells me that Hovercraft ZA1 deployed at 1341 and that it arrived in Twelve at 1358. It tells me that it dropped its first bomb at 1359 at location A on the map. It tells me it dropped a second bomb at 1400 at B, a third at 1401 at C, a fifth, a tenth, a twentieth. My eyes are blurry. I take another swig. I don't want to look at the map, but I do. My fingers drift over the outline of old streets - the Town here, the Seam there. I tremble as I locate A, as I pinpoint B. I swig. A single teardrop lands on the page, and I rub at it hastily.
The next page tells me about Hovercraft ZA2. The one after ZA3. My mug empties; I refill it.
There are thirteen pages in the folder, and through each of them I read times and look at maps. I count the numbers of bombs. By the time I reach the last page, my eyes are raw, my face puffy. My head feels cloudy and my throat is both warm and aching. My nose runs incessantly - I wipe at it with the cuff of my sleeve.
The last page isn't a page though - it's a poster. I unfold it slowly, the white card taking up the whole of the table. It's a map - similar to those on the sheets before - but this one combines the locations of all the bombings. All 213 of them. I scull the last dregs of my mug and push back from the table, grabbing the whole bottle of moonshine. I lower myself back into the seat, tucking my legs into myself. I swig. I stare. I swig.
My finger travels around the map. Blown up, I can see the details of the District. I can see exactly where bombs landed. I can see that the Bakery was blown to smithereens at precisely 1402. That the Undersees were bombed thirty seconds prior. I pause at that first bomb. My fingers absentmindedly drift to my collarbone, over my neck, to my back and the rough undulating panel of skin that curves round my left shoulder blade. Pink and puckered and scarred. I swig.
I call Madge the next morning. I'll see Peeta at three.
I knock on the door quickly and rock back on my heels. The Village is empty again, as always, but I can't help but look around, searching for something or someone to give me reason to walk off this porch and go back home. A strong wind nips at my back, the last of the autumn heat having faded. I shudder to think of the possibility of what else is behind me - Haymitch. I can imagine the old man, perched at one of his windows, booze in hand, chortling at the picture of me bouncing anxiously on this porch.
There's a faint sound of shuffling on the other side of the door. A silhouette appears through the frosted glass and for a moment the dark blob stands there, still, contemplating me, before it shifts. For a moment I think it must be a trick of the glass - the textured bumps distorting the figure - but no, it's is moving away from the door. I scowl and knock again, harder and more insistent this time.
He's back at the door in an instant, swinging it open wildly, arms tense, jaw locked, a vein throbbing at his left temple. Dark circles are painted under his eyes. They're bloodshot.
"What are doing here?"
I scrunch my nose at his tone. I scrunch my nose, too, because for some inexplicable reason, seeing the near imperceptible tick of his vein makes me want to reach out and smooth it away. I feel a burning sensation at the back of my throat, like bile, and I know I'm more perturbed by this errant urge than how Peeta is treating me. It doesn't stop me from taking it out on him.
"Hello to you too, sunshine," I glower.
He stares at me, unmoving, so I step inside, squeezing past him and making my way down the hall. It's dark, and no light shines from the dining room. Peeta stays at the door, watching me. It's not until I'm sitting at the table that I hear a sigh, the soft click of the door closing, and his heavy footfalls shuffling back down the hall.
"What are you doing here?" He repeats as he rounds the corner.
"We have a session scheduled."
His face twists. "We did yesterday too. And the Monday and Tuesday. Madge said you were sick, but lo and behold Jo mentioned having dinner with you when she was helping out at the Bakery. Must have been some 'sickness'."
He sits down at the dining table with a huff, a sneer scrunching his features.
"These 'sessions' Madge is making us do - I get it. Madge is smart, and I trust that if she thinks these 'talks' are going to help me prepare, they will."
He pauses, sighs again.
"But this 'thing' that you've made them into? Helping at the Bakery on your day off, taking me to the woods, asking about my favourite fucking colours?"
His voice is low and raspy and tired. And angry. A pulsing anger - throbbing and red and glowing. It rumbles through his tone, through his tightly-clenched fists, through his focus that flurries around the room, landing on everything but me. But amidst that burn, I can see too a slight waver of hurt.
"You can't try to make this more than a transactional work relationship and then just stop cold turkey without explanation. You can't just flit in and out of my life when it suits you!"
He looks up to me, briefly, pleading. "I'm not saying I need to talk to you everyday. Fuck, I didn't even want to do this shit-of-a-thing in the first place. But if we have to do this, I thought we'd be bloody civil enough to give the other a call when things aren't panning out. I thought we wouldn't need to bullshit each other. And I damn thought we'd be beyond using Madge as a messenger for any bullshit."
I bite the inside of my cheek, my jaw tensing. He's not wrong. It wouldn't have hurt me to call Peeta, to tell him myself that I'd be gone for a few days. But calling Peeta would've inevitably required me telling him why I'd be away.
"What happened?"
I shrug. "Something came up."
He sighs heavily and pushes back from the table, his chair screeching. "Here we go with the bullshit."
He paces to his left, to his right, then pauses, facing me head on. "Did you think perhaps that if ever I actually needed one of these sessions, if they were ever going to be useful, it would've been this week? This is your fucking job, Katniss. To talk to me. To get me comfortable with going through evidence. Yet as soon we get the first of it, you vanish!"
He runs his hands through his hair, forearms tense and fingers stiff. "Fuck, Katniss. Those documents!"
My insides curdle, this ugly yet all too familiar feeling of letting someone down, of not being enough. Again, Peeta's right - I should've been there for him, not only out of friendship or care, but because I'm being paid to.
With the feeling though is also a flicker of anger - a bridling, an indignation. Because Peeta wasn't the only one who had to read those documents. I feel my insides vibrating.
"Yeah, Peeta. Fuck those documents, hey? Did you ever think that perhaps you weren't the only one who didn't enjoy reading them?"
My voice is low and controlled, and Peeta's eyes widen slightly at the tone.
"I'm sorry, okay? I should've been there for you, and I wasn't, and I'm sorry for that. But I wasn't not here because I had better things to do, or because I didn't want to be. I wasn't here because I physically couldn't be."
I pause.
"You don't have a monopoly on suffering, Peeta."
It's a low blow, and he and I both know it. He doesn't bite back though. Instead, he sits down. His hand crawls across the grain of the table, and his forefinger hooks around my thumb, ever so softly - a pressure so light I'd think I was imagining it if I couldn't see with my own eyes the point of contact.
"Tell me about it."