Chapter Twenty-Four
I cling to the fence, my fingers knotted around the loops of wire, and it sways and swings under my grip. I stare at the open field between me and the trees, heart racing because I have done this – I have done this before. But I haven't. And I'm afraid. Afraid to run naked over the grass. Afraid to face the dark shadows of the trees.
"Come on, you can do this."
I recite the litany, as if I've done it a hundred times: they have stabbed and poisoned me, bitten, shocked and tortured me. Three times already they have stopped my heart. There really isn't anything left to fear.
I breathe and breathe. I look up at the sky. It is bright and silver, but I know … I know … since some version of me has done this already – in whatever dream or mutated flash – I can do it now. 1, 2, 3, 4 … run!
I sprint across the grass – and nothing strange happens, of course. It takes a minute to clear the grass and reach the eaves of the wood. I pause to catch my breath – I am spectacularly out of shape - then I peer cautiously into the tangled darkness. These woods, a mere sprint from my home, and I've never been here before. I squint at my shaking palms - my fingers curling with the fear that creeps on me - automatically - under the eaves of the trees.
"Wake up! It's going to be a big, big, big, big day!"
It's just twenty-four hours since Effie woke me and I sat up, blinking, to find her standing in the doorway of my bedroom at the 'crazy house,' bewigged and painted, clothed in bright colors and with a smile on her face – as if nothing had happened.
It was time to go. My birthday was properly celebrated and I had begged for permission to leave and Dr. Aurelius – having no real choice – was obligated to release me. He held it up as long as he could – paperwork, more paperwork, army discharge, legal documents – some loyalty oath to the new government and a warning about interfering with Katniss' house arrest – but after a couple of anxious weeks, he finally signed the discharge orders and scheduled me for monthly telephone appointments.
"Like Katniss?" I had asked him.
He had frowned at that. "About that," he had said. "Once you are back in District 12, I need you to convey a message to her."
I've been trying not to worry about her state of mind since then. It will be hard enough, I think, working my way back to some sort of neighborly relationship with her when the last time we were face to face. she was scowling at me for thwarting her suicide attempt. Not that that's anything new, with us, if you stop to think about it.
After breakfast with Effie and a long, meandering ride home on the train – alighting at District 12 just before midnight, all its horrors shrouded in the darkness – I had groped my way to Victors' Village, broke into my house by way of a rear window (my key had been left with my father) and slept on the sofa in my living room – a prey to nightmares. I woke up exhausted and hungry. But needing to do one thing – just this one thing – before anything else.
I step into the trees – and for a moment, I am confused: it is quiet here, except for the gentle noises of the morning birds. It is still … green and gray. The trees – old, gnarled oaks and the thin pines that intersperse them – seem solid and sleepy. Some random stream of thought brings the memory of her: Pax. I haven't thought about her for a long time - for too long a time, really. The first person to die up close to me as a result of my inaction. The death that illuminated to me all the harm inaction can actually do. Aurelius explained the old meaning of her name, and I clung to that – I found comfort in the symbolism of it. (Pax optima rerum – this was what Aurelius had inscribed on a placard in his office, which was startling the first time I saw it – "peace is the greatest good.")
But it is peaceful here, the woods of my home. The ones I was taught to fear – the home of wild beasts, monsters – the mutt. It is peaceful here.
I close my eyes in relief. For all I have been through, for everything I have feared, cowed from, avoided – for everything that I have fought, sacrificed and faced – it was this thing inside of me, this fundamental cowardice, that needed, in the end, to be conquered. If I am here to help Katniss find herself – I must first find me. The monster in me who fought pain and madness - and the frightened boy. The man who will be the product of both. I am – if not whole, if not able to grieve, still, for the people who have died, at least grappling toward a version of myself that approaches wholeness.
So, I came to meet this old fear in the woods - and found it gone. The Victor part of me, or maybe even the mutt, had already banished it, I guess. Peace is the greatest good.
The sun, slanting ever upward, causes something at my feet to shine – golden, delicate. I part my lips at the sight, remembering. One of the flowers I drew in a book – for a girl who wanted to remember. Primrose.
It's a beautiful little flower, overlapping yellow petals like a crinoline skirt, growing in bunches. I stop my hand from picking them, thinking that they will last only a few hours before dying. Instead, I get on my hands and knees and dig.
It's something I used to do - transplant herbs from my grandmother's planter into our garden. Wildflowers, I know, are all the more sensitive to being moved. But I have a feeling, a need, a compulsion. It carries me back home. I find a shovel and wheelbarrow in the basement, and I walk around my house, looking for a spot. But there is no more appropriate spot than the house three doors down from mine.
Landscaping the Victors' Village was once the job of some Capitol-paid gardeners. But in the months since the destruction of 12, the cultivated bushes and ground cover around the houses have either grown over or died away. On one side of Katniss' house, there is a patch of weeds and here is where I put my shovel.
I hear the door slam and the feet come running around to the side of her house and it's only then that I realize my enthusiasm for my chore has probably overreached politeness; but when I straighten up and face her, all those thoughts fly away. At first, I can only register that it's her - here - finally safe from the Capitol - in the place she belongs. Then, I stop - and actually look at her. She's truly not doing well – she's bony, pale and flat of expression. Her hair is matted in a nest that hangs over one side of her face and her clothes are wrinkled and stained. She looks like she's been living and sleeping in the woods for the last four weeks. It's only when she takes me in - looks from me to the flowers - that a creeping expression of some faint emotion animates the death mask of her face.
"You're back," she says.
I try to smile but can only manage a thin grimace. "Dr. Aurelius wouldn't let me leave the Capitol until yesterday. By the way, he said to tell you that he can't keep pretending to treat you forever. You have to pick up the phone." I realize when I say this that I am scared for her, terrified of the blankness - frightened that I won't be able to help her. I frown.
She looks confused, eyes searching my face. Finally, she puts her hand to her hair and attempts to brush it out. Her nails are long and dirty. She looks lost, thoroughly lost. I've seen her in every mood and circumstance over the last two years, from joy to despair, but I haven't seen her like this since that day in the rain. Only, that was mere starvation.
"What are you doing?" she asks me.
"I dug these up this morning, in the forest. For her. I thought we could plant them along the side of the house."
It's impossible to read the expressions that flit over her lifeless face, but at last she nods abruptly, as in approval, and she turns and runs back into the house. I return to my chore, digging five holes and gently transplanting the flowers. When I step back, they have that slightly faint look of all plants violently uprooted from their natural home and taken somewhere else, at someone else's whim - to either adapt or die.
The first batch burns - and not just at the tips. Nothing deliberate about this one: my kitchen fills with smoke and the loaves are quite thoroughly blackened by the flames. I watch the crusts crack and separate - like skin. No good. No good. I put them down on the counter and make grim comparisons with the dry patchwork skin of my arms. I close my eyes tight against despair. I can't have forgotten how to do this.
But the second batch is fine. It's not me, exactly - it's this oven that I haven't used in nine months, and I just needed to remember that it never did need much in the way of preheating.
I walk out into the dense morning air. It is late spring, now - the mornings are cold and damp, the afternoons are warm. You can drink that heavy golden-green atmosphere on days like this. What a blessing - what a strange, undeserved blessing - to still be alive for days like this.
I walk the path that was once a daily routine - up to Haymitch's house, careful to be quiet when opening his door. One loaf dropped off on his table (good grief, in a matter of weeks, it is well on its way back to the mess it was before). He lent me the ingredients, so he'll be expecting it. Up the next two houses to Katniss'. I eyeball the primroses - they seem to have taken without much trouble - and then pause to nod at Sae, who is shuffling up to the porch from the other direction. Her gray hair is tied up and an old apron tied around her waist. She looks surprised to see me.
"You're just in time for breakfast," she says, opening Katiniss' door and waving me in behind her.
"Have you been feeding her?"
"Trying to. But she's been low - real low."
"I just came to drop by some bread," I reply.
She takes the loaf and sniffs it appreciatively. "Ah, that will do her good, it will. And bacon will do you good, son. I've never seen a Mellark look as underfed as you do, right now. The Capitol food not filling you up these days?"
I laugh and follow her into the kitchen. "Somewhere along the way, I lost my appetite, I guess."
Katniss is sitting at the table, stroking an orange cat that looks remarkably like the one that used to live here with the Everdeens before. She glances up at me - and I see that she is already, to a certain extent, transformed. Her hair is clean and combed out, her nails are clipped and neat. She doesn't say anything, just nods. I take the bread back and start cutting it into thick slices. The bacon starts to spatter and it is such a good and homey sound; such a great and mouthwatering smell.
The sliced bread smells good, too - warm and sweet. It occurs to me that it is getting on a year since last I had freshly-baked bread. It also occurs to me that perhaps it is too soon, to sit here with her, to offer her this gift. That she might still need space from me - or even that my being here might stir memories that she would rather not relive. But no - I came here to help her and bread - bread is where it begins.
I meet her eyes and hand over the slice of bread. There is no happiness there, no, but there is - perhaps - a measure of peace.
Perhaps it is the utter banality of it all that will save us, I think later, standing in the semi-darkness of my house, trying to figure out where to begin with the unpacking. It feels a lot like I'm unpacking my old self and placing him back where he used to belong. I had packed everything for dispersal to my survivors - everything. Clothes, plates, utensils, blankets, souvenirs, books, sketchbooks - all of my paints and paintings. And then there is the trunk I brought with me from the Capitol - nothing from 13, but some things that Portia's relatives had allowed me to take from her apartment: clothes, fabric, some artwork and one of her Hunger Games sketchbooks. I start here - best to get these particular memories put away as soon as possible, I think.
I've not gone far into it when I find something I didn't pack, something hard, square and plastic. I stare at it blankly for a moment, and then I shake my head. It's a tape with a single white label on it that just says "PEETA!" in double-underlined letters. I know what this is. I know exactly what it is. The tape they kept trying to get me to watch: the 75th Hunger Games, the 3rd Quarter Quell - the filmic record of monsters and madness, and supposedly also of how I really felt about her and how she really felt about me.
Luckily, there is electricity today. Haymitch says it is sporadic - even more so than before. I don't tempt the system by turning on any lights, just let the darkness close in around me and listen to the click of the machine as it accepts the tape.
The way she kissed you in the Quarter Quell ….
For show. For show. For show.
It's poorly-edited, of course. The Capitol never had the opportunity to package it for the audience. This is someone's choppy recording off of the live broadcast and the first thing that I do is turn down the sound so that I don't have to listen to Claudius Templesmith's commentary. Flame outfits and perfect 12s and a wedding dress that melts away - OK, OK, I remember them. Then, before I'm ready for it, the sun shines on the water as the camera pans over the cornucopia and my eyes hurt from the glare. The camera follows Katniss to the center of the horn where she finds weapons and Finnick, and then they find me.
I've not gone far before I have to pause, rewind and rewatch with the volume on. I watch my own death by the high voltage of the arena wall - not by Katniss' hand, as I had somehow come to believe. I watch Katniss' reaction as Finnick works to revive me and it is - it is quite convincing. This is a bereft and emotional girl, not the hard and cool one fixed in my imagination. Something has broken in her - something to do with me. Even the Peeta on the screen is puzzled by her reaction - and Finnick is quite openly astounded. She is on-script and yet somehow she is completely unscripted.
That's as far as I can go for awhile. After a few days, perspective settles back in and I remind myself that I knew already that she was my ally, that she had pledged to protect me - and that is really all there is to it. Not that it wasn't enormous - the gift, again, of her protection. But there was no need to read further layers of meaning into it.
Once thus prepared, I return to the tape, skipping forward over all of the deaths … Mags and Wiress, and Deah, the morphling addict who saved me … to reach the night scene that begins with her leaning against me with a sigh and ends with a kiss so long and intimate that I actually feel anxious about where it is all going to end. I can't remember this - I can't. Some words of hers lingered - I do, I need you - but this kiss exists in my head in a very different form. I vaguely recall feeling assaulted - that Finnick's waking with the lightning strike saved me from an unwelcome encounter.
Am I sure - am I sure? I watch it again, unconvinced of my participation. She kissed me to stop my mouth, yes - that much is evident. Then again, to stop me from resuming the argument. There is a moment when the look on my face indicates a decision to surrender - but was there joy in the surrender, or just the surrender?
I watch it a third time, trying desperately to recall it - how it felt, how I felt about it. After the kiss, I look happy, stretching my legs over the sand, but is it happiness over the kiss or it's interruption? I honestly can't tell.