Chapter Twenty-five

I don't know why it took so long to hit me. But today is the day it does.

A hand grips me as the dirt and ashes trickle out of my fist and the large, looming, horrible shadow darkens the sky and everything inside of me. To call it crying - to call it mourning - is in all ways inadequate. It is a primal scream - something as full of rage as it is of sadness. And that's just the top layer. Underneath it, I am all curses and sobs - the sobs that rip themselves out of your body, almost taking layers of you with them. Until my gut hurts - the diaphragm, the place inside from where song comes. My voice is weak - but I am not alone; there is someone to take up the song for me:

Deep in the meadow, under the willow

A bed of grass, a soft green pillow

Lay down your head and close your eyes

And when they open, the sun will rise

Here it's safe, here it's warm

Here the daisies guard

You from every harm

Here your dreams are sweet

And tomorrow brings them true

Here is the place

Where I love you.

"Are you OK?"

"No."

"You're OK," she says.

I stir and my muscles sigh. I'm covered in dust and ashes and my own tears. The sky rumbles overhead and the light flares in the distance. The storm is coming.

She holds her hand out to me. "Come on, we don't want to be caught in this. It's going to be a good one."

I wipe my face before I take her hand and let her pull me up. "It will be a bit of a relief," I say, trying to smile. "This air is so hot and heavy. We could use the release - of a good storm."

At this she does smile. It's a rare and dazzling sight. "Exactly. Come back to my house."

"Katniss - were you singing just now?"

"Yes - sometimes it helps - when you're - when you aren't quite here."

I wipe my face again. "Shit - what do you mean? Do you do it often?"

"Only as often as you need it, which isn't all that much around me. Come on, Peeta. I don't feel like tempting the lightning today."

I follow her back toward Victor's Village, leaving the gray dust behind. I feel so hollow. The tears will not stop falling; I suppose I had been hoarding them for so long that there are too many of them; endless amounts of tears.

"How often?" I ask again.

We are at the gates now - the last fences remaining in District 12, this wrought iron cage in which the Capitol put us, birds on display. One of whom can't even sing. She turns around and looks up at me.

"Do you want the number of times since May, or something?"

I swallow. "Yes."

"I don't know - four or five. Why?"

"Shit - you know the answer to that question, Katniss. I'll always be worried - about losing control."

"But you don't - you go very still and grip whatever is at hand - the arm of the couch or the back of a chair. You don't seem capable of moving, honestly; let alone doing anything dangerous. How is it so different from when I wake up screaming my head off over nightmares? It's the opposite of dangerous - there's something helpless about it."

I glance down the row at my house, even as I follow her to hers. I bite my lip, really bite down - welcoming the sensation of pain.

The rain starts falling just as we get indoors. But it's a summer storm, so Katniss leaves the door open and the windows of the front room, in order to let in the air. The thunder rolls through and then the lightning strikes, so close behind it. The flares pulsate against the walls; the air crackles with tension. Katniss stands in the doorway, watching it with such an expression of life and wonder on her face.

The storm doesn't die off until after dinner, and by then we are huddled together on her bed. The humidity returns with the passing of the storm, and I think ungratefully about how uncomfortable it is. Discomfort is a luxury and this is a fucking gift to be lying here, sweating instead of sleeping - living instead of dead.

Usually, I stay here because she's had a bad day and the nightmares are on her face before she even tries to go to sleep. Today, the bad day has been mine and I strain against the horror of slumber as hard as I used to. I think of morphling, and the sweat on my face seems to grow cold - I tremble with the longing for it, and I hate myself for the longing of it.

She squirms around to face me in the darkness. "How are you holding up?"

"Truth?"

"Always."

"Not great."

She takes my hands and encloses them in hers, gently squeezing them with her fingers.

"I'm sorry," I whisper.

"You have nothing to be sorry about. I know this sort of grief. It lingers long past the tears. It is not because you are weak, it is because you are good - fundamentally good. If you could take their place, you would, and your body knows it and it is mourning along with your heart."

Tears start falling again. "I - wanted - to help you."

"You have, over and over again," she says, and she brings my hands up to her mouth and kisses my knuckles. "You are my comfort - let me be yours once in a while."

We are silent for a long moment - in fact, I think that she is asleep, so that I am startled by her sudden question. "Is that why you're here?"

"Here?"

"In - Twelve. Did they send you to - watch me?"

"No - in fact, most people didn't think it was a great idea - my being here. I came because - God, Katniss, where else would I go? This is home and you and Haymitch are the only two people in the world I have left. I don't have the words to explain the feeling … when I found out there was a place I could actually return to - the pull was … I needed to be here and I came back - as soon as I possibly could.

"When I saw you - saw that you needed help in kind of the same way that I had … of course, I had to be here for you … but was I sent back with that purpose? One of your guards? One of your jailers? I could never. If they had asked me to do that I would have gone anywhere else, instead."

I feel her fingernails dig into my hand, and the sensation doesn't altogether stop there. "It's too hot," she says. "Tomorrow, we are going to go to the lake."

In the morning we avoid the sad places - the remains of town and the overturned earth of the Meadow - and skirt the slag heaps and the old mine entrance to the edge of District 12, now marked by the tall metal poles that once held up the fences. I bite my lip on the usual dread that comes from crossing the field. There is always a danger of slipping into multiple memories at once, and for some reason the nakedness of the open field between fence and forest still makes my skin crawl.

But the world is blue and green, not silver, and nothing strange happens. After pausing - as always - at the eaves of the wood, I follow her in and we start down the footpath that cleaves through the trees. She told me about it, herself, when she found out I was venturing into the woods. This was the path she and Gale followed on their many hunts. It was most recently the flight path of the survivors of District 12, when the Capitol attacked.

The woods quickly thicken around us, growing dark and crowding out the sun. Her tread is soft and I watch the quiver and bow jostle on her back as she goes. The hunter, I think. The arrow to my heart. And yet, I kept returning. Through trust and suspicion. Love and frustration. Mistrust and alliance. Back and forth. Back and forth.

We pause to rest in a clearing with a boulder; in fact, this is the last landmark of the woods that I know. This is the farthest I've ever come. There is a wide, flat rock off the path that juts out through the trees and overlooks a shallow ravine. We don't sit on the rock, but sit cross-legged in the shade of the trees. All her assurances aside, I feel this need to explain my behavior from yesterday.

"Resilience," I say out loud.

She looks at me in surprise. "What?"

I shake my head. "Sorry – I was just thinking about yesterday. About somehow moving on, somehow living through all this grief and all the horrible memories. Aurelius calls it 'resilience.'"

She rolls her eyes at the name. She doesn't talk to him as often as she should. Not revolution nor enormous grief – not the end of the world as she knows it – could rid Katniss of this stubborn independence. It's what kept her alive – what will always keep her alive. I had some hand in it – but, not much, really. Physically, survival is what she does. She needs help from no one there.

It's this other thing. Happiness – which even in the best of times she found a bit suspicious, as if self-indulgent and distracting. "But what does it mean?" she asks.

"Well – it's the ability to sort through trauma and contain it enough to survive. It's in all of us – that's what Aurelius says. We just work through it in different ways. For me …" I pause, giving her time to stop me with a dismissive or sarcastic comment, if she wants, but she only continues to look at me curiously. "For me – well, I went through a series of negotiations to get by. For instance – feeling like you should have loved me, then ultimately deciding you were a monster for not doing it. I could blame the Capitol, but ... but – even that was nothing more than an excuse. It actually wasn't that I really thought you were a monster. I thought I was – I knew that I was – and I just deflected that on you. That's what is meant by resilience. It's not always clean. It's just what you do to survive."

If I'm expecting shock or horror from her, I'm surprised to see a certain empathetic sadness instead. "You thought you were a monster?"

"You remember what it was like after the Games. The guilt from having survived and – that feeling like everything real was tainted by it."

"Yes, but – I thought maybe you had been spared that. You didn't really let them – change you in there. At least – it looked that way."

"Maybe you resented that," I tell her, with sudden enlightenment.

She shakes her head. "Maybe. Maybe I also wanted to protect it. Winning the Games is so dirty, but I thought if your hands were clean, at least I had done - something - right."

I smile at her. "You wanted me innocent. Pure – even."

"Don't laugh at me."

"I'm not laughing, Katniss. You have no idea – how humbling it is to hear this."

She half turns away from me, trouble on her face - then changes her mind and turns back. "It's that, but it's more than that. At one time, it felt like a debt - everything that I owed you. But at some point it became more than that. Like you were the better part of me. And that to - watch over you - was more than repayment of a debt; to watch over you was in some way to watch over myself."

"I know," I tell her. "I mean - I didn't know, consciously, but I did, somehow figure it out, I think, during the Quell. When I knew that you intended to sacrifice yourself for me. What you gave me - that gift of protecting me - was deeper than love. I was too shallow to appreciate it; I could only try my best not to spoil it. But - I did know."

"You give me too much credit - or yourself too little. I'm not sure. How were we to ... who were we to sort through all of that mess? All I know is that - I failed, as with everything else."

"I know you can't really believe that. I'm sorry, Katniss. They took everything, didn't they? Corruption – that's what they knew. Take a bird – twist it into a spy. Release it to die. That's what they knew."

"The jabberjays might have died," she says, "but the mockingjays came after."

"Exactly." I smile at her. "Resilience."

She gets up to leave, giving me an odd glance as she does.

"This is as far as I've ever come," I say, standing up myself and looking around.

She turns to me with a curious expression and I point toward the rock. "Here?" she says, raising her eyebrows.

"Yeah - it's a good place to draw."

"Oh. Yes - I can see that," she says.

She makes a movement to continue on, but I don't follow. Something unnerving in her expression - and guarded. I wonder what it is I could possibly have said. "Katniss?"

She turns back.

"What?" I ask her. "What is it? You look like I've – done something wrong."

Her face is stubborn – it's a very familiar closed-off look. "Truth?" she says.

"Truth?" I repeat. "Of course - always."

"This is where Gale and I used to meet, that's all."

"Well – that makes sense," I reply. "I can see that. If … you'd rather that I left it alone, of course. Whatever."

She grimaces. "That would be ridiculous. It's nothing – it really isn't. I was just set back – by the coincidence."

I shake my head. "No, it was more than that. You can tell me – if you want. You miss him." I lick my lips. "You love him."

She sighs, the look on her face so clear - like we have finally reached the conversation she has been dreading for months. "Love? He was my friend. Like you were my friend. Maybe he was long and slow where you were quick and sudden … but …"

"You don't have to say this," I interrupt hastily, suddenly realizing that the dread is not only on her side.

"But you want to know, don't you?" she asks me, keenly.

I swallow. "I know you've never liked talking about it. And I didn't ever really want to hear it. Maybe it's time. I don't know."

She nods. "You know - you guys were the ones who skipped straight ahead to love. It's not like either of you asked. Just demanded answers. Perhaps I felt like there were more important things to do … and perhaps I didn't want it - not yet, anyway."

"I can't speak for Gale, but-." I stop and smile. "And obviously I can't really even speak for myself, I guess. But – love is funny. It feels like a shared thing, even when it's only one-sided. And when you're a kid – and you really don't know how love works …. And there was everything else, of course." I run my hand through my hair. And try to remember. "You're right – the timing was not great. It's just – you can't help it. It happens. You do crazy things, you say crazy things. Regrettable things - maybe. You try to get out with dignity, if you can." I hesitate - but the question is hanging in the air between us, so there is nothing else I can do. "Katniss? Why is Gale not here? Is it because of you or because of him?"

"Me," she says, shortly. "Gale and I - we're too much alike. That's problematic at the best of times. But right now – especially when I am not particularly happy with myself - it would be no help to me to see my reflection in his face - all fire and destruction."

I feel sad for her - or, at least, I try to. "I've always had a soft spot for the theory of the attraction of opposites."

She looks at me with a swift smile.

"Sorry - I really shouldn't have said that."

"Why not? What's the point of keeping secrets anymore?"

"It's not keeping secrets - it's keeping the balance. Not messing up what we have right now. Comfort - isn't that what you called it?"

"Yes - that's what I called it. But it's only comfort if it's also honest."

For the space of a several heartbeats, I can't find my voice. "I'll - keep that in mind," I finally tell her.

She looks at me coolly. "I'm counting on it."

"Here we are," she says, as we step out of the thickest section of the woods and my eyes are dazzled by the bright sun. We are in a place of intense beauty and it's astounding – the sun, sparkling everywhere – the white rocks tumbling down toward a wide, flat lake, which shimmers as if made of diamonds. The sky is nearly completely blue now – the hills rise up on the other side of the lake, the green trees marching up the slopes – all dark and solid and still.

"I've been here before," I say, awestruck for a moment.

"What?!" she exclaims.

I shake my head. "No – no – that's not it. I saw a video of this place. You were here – and you were singing."

Her face scrunches up for a moment, then she seems to remember herself and she shrugs. "Oh," she says. "Singing. Forgot about that."

Yes, singing, I think to myself as she turns away from me and starts walking toward the water. And she could do for more of it. And so could I. But I'm too caught by my memories to say anything right now. This place. This place where she sang – for the rebellion, yes – but where, for the first time, as if I could still see her father enchanting the birds with his voice, I separated her from the mutt and remembered her true parentage – the mockingbird, the natural voice of the wilderness, nature at its purest. It's almost too much for my head to take - to actually be here. It's like a dream, but a good one for once.

I set down my pack on the beach and stare down at the shimmering water. In itself it is a temptation to let all the memories dissolve into each other and take me back – back to when anger and rage was the fire that kept me alive – back to when I was hunted by the mutt, or by the goddess with the arrow – and I was fearful but also tempted and also wanted, desired … if only in that very twisted way.

But I find I can't go back. And when the temptation passes, I know that I don't want it to come back. There is feeling in me again, now. It is small and it quivers with the uncertainty of new life. But it is not dangerous and it is real.

You loved her …

"Check that out," she says, pointing behind me.

I glance back and see – not far from where we came out of the trees – a little concrete house, just inside the woods. She's described this to me – this ancient remnant of some ancient civilization preceding the Dark Days … who knows how far back – and again I feel wrongheaded, as if finding myself stepping on fictional ground.

I follow her down to the water. She yanks her boots off and stands for a moment, bare-toed, in the shallows, before giving me a wry glance and then pulling her shirt over her head.

"Whoa!" I say, looking hastily away. "Warn a guy, why don't you?"

"I don't care if you see me naked."

I look back at her and blink. She's turned away from me and I can see it - the worst of her scars, from where the flames ravaged her back. It's worse than my arms, and they are pretty bad. Yet, I do not find it ugly - in a strange way, I find it pleasing, the familiar mottling of the multi-colored patchwork of skin new, old and manufactured. Fire mutts - this is what she calls us, almost dismissively. Yes - we were deliberately burned, burned and burned in their fires until matter finally collapsed and we had to be reshaped into somewhat twisted versions of ourselves. But there's a kind of poetry in it, I think. As if our outsides eventually reflected what had already happened within. And - in the process - making us more similar to each other than different. Seam and Town are gone, buried alike under ash ...

She peels off her jeans and then cranes her head again, to turn back and give me another glance; this one with a question in it.

I swallow. "I do," I say. "I care." In all this time - in all this time - I have never even seen her naked. My recollection of her was that she was always so modest - and that I liked it at least as much as it frustrated me. I'm not sure how to deal with this situation.

"Yeah," she says, glancing down at her scarred arms. "It's not pretty," she adds, with a strange smile.

My heart starts thumping erratically. "That's not what I meant."

She turns around and crosses her arms over her breasts. "Then - what did you mean?"

"I mean that there have always been lines. That I care about you enough to care about them. That I value - the lines."

She laughs shortly. "Those were different people and a different place and time. Look - you won't offend me by saying it. You don't look at me the same way - you don't feel about me the same way. It's OK to say it."

The drumming of my heart threatens to overwhelm her words, it is so loud in my ears now. "But I thought you wanted honesty."

"What do you -?"

I take a step toward her. "Katniss, you - are beautiful. Your scars - are beautiful."

She sighs and half turns away. "That's what people say when they feel sorry for -."

I grab her arm. "No. Maybe some people, but not me. Your scars - you …."

"Yeah, I earned them, I know."

I snort. "Fuck earning anything. Especially anything to do with their wars. You survived. That's what makes them beautiful. You think I'm bullshitting you? I've had half a leg since the first arena. And it sucked at first, in all the vain, pointless ways you can think of. And - maybe in the depths of it, I didn't care about my life, but - you saved me and I can't help it - to have survived feels so good, even when it hurts to live."

"I don't - I don't ..." she starts. Then she shakes her head.

"I know." Then I grimace and let her arm go. Can you truly have both comfort and honesty? That is the question, isn't it?

There is naked, I recall. And there is naked. Throat open to the wolf. Heart open to the wolf.

"Truth?" I ask her.

She looks up at me. "What?"

"Do you want the truth? Really want it?"

"Yes. Yes, of course."

"There were so many times I thought I had closed the door on you. Finally told myself - 'I'm done.' I thought that was what you wanted. But where does love go when it's rejected? I just did what I could with it; used it for you, for them. Tried to get some good out of it. And then they - took - all of that away, turned it inside out, made propaganda out of it - and then a weapon. And after it was over, again I thought 'OK, I'm done. At least, I'm done.' And yet - still - still I'm not.

"Sweetheart, be as naked as you want to be. Just understand that - the lines I draw between us? Those are for you, not for me. They were always for you. And they still are - when I sleep with you at night and cook for you in the morning - when you stand naked before me and I want you as much as I ever did. The lines are yours for the crossing - not mine."

She looks at me, gaping slightly with the look of someone who got much more than she bargained for. I have always been sensitive to this and I have always held back. But I am starting to understand - she just doesn't have the language to ask; she has held affection so very close to her - expressing it in actions over words, when expressing it at all. I was waiting for words. She - was waiting for ... something else, I suppose. After all, my words have not always been to be trusted. But if she doesn't trust them now, she might never. And we will have to live with that. And it will be fine. I'm done laying claim to things that don't belong to me. The only thing I want now is peace. Mine and hers. No matter how it comes. Peace.

Katniss dives in and out of the water, as if she were a fish – she's nearly as good as Finnick was, and the sun glimmers on her skin. I splash around in the waist-deep water, occasionally dipping my head in as relief against the growing heat of the day. I just watch her – it's like she's given me permission, after all – and I simply try to appreciate how much better she looks, all these months later, after a spring and summer spent in hunting and baking, eating, drinking, and worrying Haymitch. If her torments won't leave her alone at night, at least now, during the day, she has started to embrace life again, and some kind of routine.

I squint into the water, thinking now about the lines that connect us, instead of the ones that divide us. The lines that connected us before we were even born, with my father's infatuation and her father's mystical voice. The ones I drew myself - with my public declarations and my private yearnings. The ones that were woven between us - strangling us sometimes - by the Games and the Capitol - by Haymitch and the Rebellion. Impossible to sift through all the knots, the frays, the tangles. All I know is that - right now - it is just her and me - bound, still, by all the forces that pulled us together in the first place. But with no one else left but us - not Snow nor Coin, not Cinna nor Portia - nor Gale. So what do we do with -?

A sudden splash and I yelp as she startles me by bursting out of the water right next to me. She laughs and grabs my hand. "Come deeper," she says.

We go until the water is up to my chest – if I stand on my tiptoes – and she has to paddle around to keep her head above the water.

"You've forgotten everything I taught you about swimming," she says.

I cock my head at her for a second. "But – you weren't teaching me how to swim. You were trying to get me to run off with you."

Her look of surprise is swallowed up by water as she ducks back under the surface of the lake. When she comes up, she is snorting water out of her nose. "You remember?" she asks.

I have to wait a second time for her to bob out of the water, and this time, I grab her and pull her up into my arms. The water laps around us for a second as I hesitate on my answer – and in my hesitation, I just feel her against me, all of her smooth, rough, warm skin. Water blunts the sensation – a little. But I have to swallow before I can talk again. "I've watched it – the Quell."

"Have you now?" she says against my neck.

"Yes. I brought a copy of it home with me. I've watched it – a few times."

"So then – you remember," she says.

I shake my head. "Katniss – I've seen it. I know what happened. I believe what happened. But no – I don't remember."

She cranes her neck back so she can look up at me, and the movement brings her body closer into mine. That ache – that pain – sharpens suddenly and I realize that I have underestimated, previously, its strength.

She drops her eyes. "I do," she says, softly. "I remember. Maybe that is enough."

"I want to," I say.

And she kisses me.

It is neither slow nor soft. It is urgent, aggressive – hungry. It's as if the end of that kiss in the Quell, more than a year ago, now, was just a placeholder – and in the interim it has grown in intensity and in meaning, too. It's as if it is designed to smash through all of my fences. To cut through all of the knots. I can barely keep up with her questing, seeking mouth and tongue – she pulls me in, closer, closer – we can't get any closer and she's still pulling me in - her arms hard, her lips soft. My fingers move up the curve of her back, and the rough texture feels so good against the soft tips of my fingers that I wonder how I ever will persuade her to stop.

But we fall backward into the water together, and that forces our separation. Briefly, in the moment before I pop up, sputtering for air, I look at her next to me – naked, her hair spread out around her in the green-lighted water.

She swims toward shallower water and I follow, every nerve in me – every cell, every inch of my bones and all of my skin - sizzling and awake. When we stand, ankle deep in the water – she naked, me as a good as – we stare at each other for a moment. Then I say: "Oh, that does ring a bell."

She laughs at that, but only for a little while. Her stare at me is thoughtful - pensive - quizzical. I think to myself: I love the way her chin tilts up, defiant and strong. I love the lights in her eyes; how all the emotions she keeps out of her stoic face are right there - if you look for them. I love her stoicism. Because it is exactly by its absence that I can understand the enormity of how she actually feels.

The way she kissed you in the Quarter Quell…

For show? No - and I knew this before. And I will know it - I will know it - once again. I can see it in the depths of the look she is giving me right now. There is only one bond between us that matters right now - in this second. Everything else can be sorted out later.

"Peeta," she says. "Peeta Mellark …."

I raise my eyebrows at her as she hesitates on what she is about to say. What if she can't say it? What if I have to say it for her? Does it even matter?

The crackle of the fire wakes me and I sit up, startled. As usual, as before, as always – maybe forever now – the dreams ended with me alone in a cave, blood on my hands. It takes longer than normal to get my bearings. I am naked and in an unfamiliar place. The concrete floor of the little house – door open to the fire that is still burning on the sand just outside.

She stirs in an automatic movement – a routine so old now, she can do it in her sleep. She pulls me back down next to her, shushing me with her gentle voice.

As I lie back down, her eyes open and I stare into them. They glitter in the firelight and I am overwhelmed by the fire that is glowing inside me – the fire that comes from her. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen - the gray-eyed girl who holds my life in her hands. Friend, lover, neighbor, victor - ally.

I take a strand of her hair and hold it, thoughtfully, while her eyes hold mine. I can see she is looking for words; but that was always my job.

"You love me," I whisper. "Real, or not real?"

And she says: "Real."