Eventually, something will have to give.
Katniss feels it, twisting in her gut and setting the hairs on her arm on edge — that inevitability, that clock ticking towards its inexorable end. She is a few days past being able to rely on medical issues or concussion induced confusion to keep her away from the planning and the decisions that have to be made with that planning. And she is nearly on the brink of exhausting the amount of time she has to stay lost in her grief. She's learned by now that there is little time and no room to grieve in Thirteen, not with the precision of their schedules and the miles of stone they share quarters with.
Of course, Alma Coin's everpresent shadow and the burgeoning war don't stop the endless, crashing tide of heartbreak and confusion. For as long as she can stay in this private medical compartment on her own, Katniss cycles between things that she knows intimately (anger, sparking up at the thoughts of Gale; frustration, when she strays to Thirteen's resident Gamemaker), newer companions (the branching curiosity that stirs when she thinks of Peeta), and the strange, almost untouchable emotions she has never learned how to confront (the empty chasm that reels around, searching for the places that Twelve occupied and no longer does; the yawning jaw of rebellion that Katniss has never fathomed but knows will mean nothing but more blood — blood spattered on the ground of every district, blood coating her hands).
There is one saving grace (because there is always one saving grace; there is always one, clear, tangible hope) and that is Prim. Katniss had known that she and her mother were alive and as well as anyone else that hadn't gone another round with an arena, but there is a difference between knowing and seeing, and someone must have decided that no other nurse would be as effective for Katniss' recovery as Prim.
But even placing the thoughts next to each other — the machinations of Thirteen's command against her unbeguiling, gentle-handed sister — is enough to raise bile in the back of Katniss' throat. So during the times that Prim comes to check on her, Katniss chooses instead to focus only on her sister.
This, at least, is easy.
"You can eat more than this, you know," Prim says, her words wrapped around the spine of a sigh as she pulls the last tray of half-eaten lunch from beneath Katniss' bed. "Your stomach is stronger than you give it credit for. And if someone besides me catches you doing this, you'll be written up."
"You can eat what's left over," Katniss replies. She watches the tray without the concern that Prim's warning was meant to warrant. There's no room for worry against the genuine offer, anyway; Prim's looking healthier these days, more than Katniss wants to admit, with the well-balanced and perfectly nutritious meals that Thirteen gives its citizens three times a day. But she could be more — she could be healthier, stronger, happier than this. She can always be healthier, stronger, happier, so Katniss will always find something to give her sister to make it so.
Prim, though, clucks her tongue disapprovingly. "I'm not the one recouperating from grievous injury, Katniss. And besides, they'd write us both up for that one."
Katniss is still unsure what it means, to be written up. But it doesn't sound like something that she wants to be particularly concerned about — it doesn't sound like being strung up in the center of town at a whipping post, your flesh forcibly lashed from your bones — and in the moment she thinks of the comparison, Katniss hates herself a little more, again. Even though she already did, and even though the thought came to her as unbidden as it is unwelcome; because some paper infraction doesn't feel real in the way that counts.
But she can concede, at least, that she'd prefer nothing to happen to Prim at all, ever. So Katniss reaches forward for the container of sweet gelatin and the metal spoon, and Prim makes a contented noise in the back of her throat so that's as good as anything else.
While Katniss eats, Prim looks at the chart at the foot of her bed, then quickly shines a light into each of Katniss' eyes. It's not something that she's ever looked forward to, but at least when her sister does it, Katniss doesn't immediately see the brilliant explosions of lightning tearing down the domed forcefield above the arena. Any better alternative is alright in her book and besides, she's not about to refuse the ministrations. It's Prim.
"They're right," Prim says finally, sitting back a little heavily at the edge of the bed. "I don't see any lingering signs of a concussion. You're going to be just fine."
The last assessment comes with a force that Katniss hadn't been expecting, and her heart trembles a little with it. Just fine — of course she will be. Of course she will, because how can she not, with Prim's conviction about it? Her desire for it? Despite herself, Katniss feels the edge of her lips soften and one side pull up, fluttering into a grin that warms her from its conception right through all the bones in her jaw.
"Everyone always says I have a hard head," she replies. Prim's own mouth flickers, caught between pulling up and down. Katniss watches her, stomach rolling, then leans forward, careful not to spill her gelatin as she reaches out and smooths the end of one of Prim's twin braids. It falls over her shoulder, the warm yellow a deep and striking contrast against the dulled white of her medical uniform shirt. For a moment, Katniss marvels at its softness — with the caustic soaps and shampoos in Thirteen, it's nothing short of miraculous that her sister's hair has stayed so warm and soft, the way it always has.
Finally, after a moment that stretches on forever, a silence that Katniss would gladly live in for the rest of her days, Prim says quietly, "You do. But that doesn't mean it can't break."
No, no it doesn't. There is a pit in Katniss' stomach that opens wide when she realizes that the days where she might smooth over Prim's worries with gentle words might be behind them. Fleetingly, Katniss reels at the thought that it might be her fault — that she doesn't have that gentleness anymore, that her roughness has hewn so deeply into her that it will never again be possible to exist without it getting in the way. Not even with Prim.
And maybe that's true. Probably, that's true. But as Katniss looks at Prim, backlit by the low, washed-out lighting, far below the surface of the earth, hidden away in Thirteen with nothing of Twelve to go back to, she understands that Prim's stubbornness comes from a deeper place. This is all bigger than Katniss and her personal failings.
She cannot protect her sister, here.
"Then I'm glad you're here to make sure it doesn't."
Prim's entire expression brightens at that, determination firming up the soft lines of her face, glinting with ice in her eyes. Ready and clever, capable of working hard — wanting it. For just the time it takes to draw a breath, Prim is replaced by the little girl on the Victory Tour, who'd come right up to Katniss with brilliant, starry-eyed determination to be just like her.
Katniss doesn't want to vomit on herself and on Prim. So she sets the tray aside on the bedside table and draws her sister into the circle of her arms, pressing Prim's head just below her chin, feeling the softness that remains in her hair and her unchapped, undamaged face, free of calluses and scars. Prim feels a little bigger — taller, with almost enough meat on her bones to be healthy — and all the noises this far underground are strange and muffled and still, somehow, a little echoey. This is nothing like Katniss has ever known, but it also like everything Katniss has ever known because holding Prim close, feeling her alive and breathing, is the only thing Katniss is sure she still knows how to do.
As with everything else, this, too, must come to an end. Katniss pulls back, at first only enough to reach up and smooth the few flyaway strands of hair that have come undone throughout the day. But then they separate, Prim insisting through gesture that Katniss at least finish the gelatin.
"I'm sure in a day or two they'll let you leave," Prim says. "We have a compartment with Mom, a few levels down. The rest of our things are there."
The few things that survived Twelve — perhaps even Katniss' spile and pearl. The things that didn't burn up under the weight of flames, things that Katniss won't think about because if she does, all she can feel are the things that are gone. So she only nods.
"Alright."
"It's not that bad." Perhaps Prim can read her expression, or perhaps she simply knows Katniss well enough to guess. It's enough to startle a half-humored snort from the back of Katniss throat, to which Prim replies, "It's not! We have food, and it's safe enough. You'll see."
She will — she will, regardless of whether or not she wants to. She might even want to, to test the novelty of safe enough, find out what it means.
Those thoughts, though — Katniss knows that they are not ones she will voice with Prim. "How is everyone else?"
Prim hums contemplatively. "Mom's alright. She's working in the hospital most of the time, though they won't let her be a doctor. Not yet, at any rate, but I'm sure they'll realize what they're missing out on sooner rather than later."
That does catch Katniss by surprise. It's not until she hears Prim lay it out like that that she realizes how intrinsically her mother is entwined with the thought of healing. It doesn't make sense, excluding her from the one thing she is not only good at, but better than anyone Katniss has ever known. — But then she finds herself stuck on the image of her mother packing snow against Gale's back, herself frantically digging up fresh powder from where it had fallen because what else could they use?
She very nearly laughs at the image of carrying down handfuls of snow from the decimated remains of what had been Thirteen's surface, trailing melting water down the endless stairs, flooding the cage of an elevator.
"I'm sure," Katniss says. She's not sure, now. But Prim is, or Prim says she is, and that is all that matters.
"I haven't seen Haymitch." Everyone else — of course Prim would include Haymitch. Katniss realizes belatedly that weeks ago, this wouldn't come as the surprise that it does. But Prim doesn't know about Katniss' anger. Prim doesn't know the rusted over ache that sits like so much old, rotting barbed wire deep, deep in Katniss' stomach, worn out but biting her every time she moves. Prim won't know, because knowing means understanding betrayal so intimate and audacious that it poisons you from the spaces inside that you can't reach to clean out.
So Katniss says: "Why not?" Because that is what the person who was Katniss Everdeen would ask, and she will be that person for Prim.
"He's not handling the lack of — of — "
"There's nothing to drink."
"It's hard. For him."
I'll bet. As if any of this was easy. As if this wasn't his choice — and now he's hiding away — why? To protest Thirteen's prohibition on alcohol? Staging his own little rebellion in the heart of a turmoil he created by way of her hand and her heart? There is a small voice in the back of her mind, one that speaks in cadences too like Peeta's to drown out entirely, that reminds her that some of her assessment must be unfair. It must.
But of course it must. What in this world is ever fair?
"Alright." It's the closest Katniss can get to gentle agreement. They will both have to accept that. Prim nods.
"You've seen Gale." Prim taps one finger against one on another hand, then taps a second. "Peeta's doing better."
"Better?" Katniss swallows back the acidic shock that comes from the quick succession of Gale's name — the anger that it stirs up — and then Peeta's.
"He was already in bad shape before the lightning. Likely from that forcefield, and everything else. But he's more aware, now. He walks more, too. That's what they're trying to do — get him moving around as much as possible."
Katniss will be seeing Peeta's abused and aching body in her nightmares for some time. Possibly for the rest of her life. This she knows, and this she can live with; it almost soothes down like ointment — like atonement, something in her grasp that can make up for each and every one of her failings. When the guilt comes, even that has little hold on her. After all, she is doing penance either way, and it is not as if she will ask for forgiveness.
Distantly, like a breeze rattling the cattails on an early spring morning, she wonders why they have not seen each other, if they are both wandering, testing the limits of their medical leaves.
But then she thinks she knows why, and she cannot remember what Sunday morning breezes feel like.
"I don't see Beetee either, although that's because he's mostly working with the other technology experts. I did get to assist with his recovery in the beginning — he's lucid, and his work is done sitting. He'll be alright. I think having something to do is the best thing for him."
Reaching forward, Katniss smooths her thumb over the side of Prim's hand in a tender arc. "You'd know best. I saw the rope you gave Finnick. That was a smart move, Little Duck."
It's clear as day, a movie playing some memory of when Prim was small and Katniss would say Duckling and Prim would smile and press closer or take her hand or, rare and luminously beautiful for it, laugh. Like the afterimage of a flash photograph, little Prim's laughing face is superimposed against Prim now — firmer, bigger, tilting her head in honest confusion that still cuts right through Katniss like steel.
"You saw Finnick?"
Breath stutters in his throat, as if it cannot remember how to claw its way up from her lungs. Frantic and spiking into desperation, Katniss wonders what that means — a condemnation that she has not visited Peeta? An accusation that she is well enough for this but not to step into the role that people have bled to make for her? A suspicion that her love, her story, her life is the lie that it is? Katniss' lips tingle, her hands shake —
— Then she is here, again. Here, below the earth. Here, with Prim. Prim who looks at her with all the lost worry of someone who could never use the things Katniss has done wrong against her, no matter how much she deserves it.
Prim, Prim, Prim. The only good that Katniss knows to be what it is: true and vibrant and humbly sincere.
"I was restless," she says, because that is true, too. Not as true as Prim, but it doesn't feel like a lie in her mouth, doesn't sit heavy and pointed behind her teeth. "I needed to walk around."
Prim watches her, keen and bright-eyed, but in that same soft way as her hair and her face, and then she leans in to tuck a lock of hair behind Katniss' ear. It's a dizzying thing — a thing that shouldn't be because it defies the natural order: Katniss takes care of Prim. That is what guides her and tells her what her next step will be. Without it, she loses herself, if only a little.
"That's good," Prim tells her, and something animal in Katniss' chest rocks itself against the brittle cage of her ribs. Good, good, that's good. Prim doesn't lie. Prim is smarter and stronger than Katniss has given her credit for. And Prim has said that's good. "Whenever you feel like it, whenever you can, you should walk around. Talk to people."
She can — she can do that. She can wander the hallways and flash her disordered badge as a pass. She can talk to Finnick, who never asks from her more than she is capable of giving, who never avoids her for lack of knowing what to say.
"Am I people?"
The voice rolls down Katniss' spine and she expects the ire that bursts, hungry and defiant from deep within her. But by the time it gets to her surface — to her teeth and her nails and the hair on the back of her neck — it is dulled around the edges. As if it, too, has been medicated. Or: as if it, too, has been brought to heel under Prim's honeyed touch.
"Yes," Prim says, standing up from the bed and straightening the uniform collar at her neck — as if she has made it so, just by saying it.
To be fair, Katniss finds no will within her to argue with her sister. Maybe Prim knows this. Or maybe this is what they have always been: Prim, the best person Katniss knows, and Katniss, who has vowed to live for her. With confidence born of their mother's quick, sure fingers, Prim takes the old tray of food in favor leaving the fresh one and turns on her heel towards the door.
Gale reaches out — a familiar pattern, moving to rest his hand on the top of Prim's hair. But then she shifts in one fluid motion, moving the tray to one hand and wrapping her free arm around his middle. Katniss sees the startle work down the length of his spine and when he catches her gaze, she forgets to be angry with him.
She has never seen him look so gently surprised. She wants to memorize the expression.
"Make sure she eats," Prim says, pulling away. The lines around Gale's mouth soften, something warm budding to life in the depths of his gaze. Katniss sees her friend in him: the one that held Prim close at the Reaping, perched her up on his shoulders so she could see above the crowd, carried a goat all the way home from market so that he might see the joy on her face.
Katniss sees her family here, the both of them, whole and bent but not broken, and it only lasts as long as it takes Prim to slip from the room but the image stays with her when she returns back to reality and it is only her and Gale left.
He doesn't sit on the bed; he takes the chair, eyeing her first, then the food.
"Don't make me a liar to your sister," he says — not angry, not as well-humored as they once were.
"You have to at least try, first."
"— Fair enough."
Before Katniss can put the pieces together, Gale has her tray in hand and is leveraging a spoonful of some stewed carrot mixture toward her mouth. Caught entirely unaware, guided by the driving force that is Gale Hawthorne, Katniss eats the entire thing in one bite, and forgets — everything. Forgets to hate the taste, forgets her indignation, her outrage. Forgets Gale's unwillingness to understand Thirteen for what it is and what it's doing.
Instead, she chokes.
She chokes on a delighted, startled laugh that wrenches free from her so violently that she has to hack down the vegetables before she spits them onto the blanket. Gale starts, caught halfway between freezing and pounding her back, but then she swallows and keeps laughing and Gale trembles into a shower of chuckles of his own.
Sunday mornings in late March; the wind tangling in the long grass and bending the cattails; dew clinging to the soft green leaves. Katniss can feel it again — the only thing she longs for. The simplicity of watching day cluster itself overhead and burn away the morning fog. The almost-sweet taste of a breeze that is wrapped around a winter melting away, more each day. Saying nothing, and being understood for it.
Katniss takes the tray from Gale and — for the memories, for Prim's very direct order — begins to eat.
"So, in order to not fight again —"
"That was because you're stubborn," Katniss says around a mouthful of potato-something. Gale snorts.
"Sure. Anyway, in order not to fight again, I figured we'd talk about you getting out of here."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I ran into some of your other nurses. They're kicking you out tomorrow."
Inevitable, she'd known. Everything reaches its inevitable end. Katniss has known this since the Reaping. Since she was twelve, and her world dissolved into burning coal. She nods, doggedly working to finish the vegetables in front of her.
"I figured," she replies.
Gale watches her in silence. Though she is still looking at the food in front of her, she can feel the weight of his gaze.
He doesn't make to leave, but she still says: "Stay."
For them, for now, this is enough.
Peeta must be close. Thirteen would not waste limited, precious space to expand their infirmary beyond the explicitly necessary. Peeta must be close and his name must be on some list, somewhere. Surely the nurses would know. Surely his name would be printed neatly and cleanly on a door, like her own. There are only a few hallways here outside of the intensive care units. It would take her maybe fifteen minutes to find where he is.
Katniss is light on her feet as she beats her familiar path down two segments of the hallway and around the corner.
Thirteen is outfitted with lights at all times. During what must be the day (but who can know, so far from the world above?) low-watt bulbs cast a dull ivory sheen throughout every room. At night, even lower-watt strips of yellow light glow at the seams between the floor and ceiling and the walls. It haunts her, sometimes, that muted yellow. It turns all of her dreams the same sickly color.
But now, at least, they illuminate Finnick's familiar form.
His hands are still where they rest on his lap, fraying rope held between them. Katniss notices a fresh cord sitting on his bedside table, but assumes he has not yet touched it. It's still wrapped carefully around itself, pristine in a way that doesn't quite make sense down here. He doesn't notice her when she knocks, or when she slips through the door.
"Finnick."
Or the first time she says his name.
Louder, she says, "Finnick."
He blinks once, heavily, then turns her way. Even when there gazes meet, Finnick spends a few long moments still searching; Katniss does not guess at what he's looking for. She only waits until recognition blooms in his expression, and a smile follows behind — slowly, but growing like one of those flowers, the ones that only bloom at night but grow wide, reaching their petals up to the soft light they seek.
"Everdeen," he says. Katniss watches him, softens, sits beside him.
"You should be sleeping," she says without heart, without bite, with a shadow of well-pressed amusement. "You must be breaking some sort of curfew, or something."
"I won't tell if you won't." There's a strength in his voice that Katniss hadn't realized that she'd been missing until she hears it again. She huffs a sound that could be taken for a blush of humor.
"I know a good deal when I hear it." Tucking one leg underneath herself and propping the other one up so she can lean on her knee, the hard and contemplative line of her mouth softens more. "I've got a little news."
"I'm all ears."
"Apparently they think my head's as good as it's going to get. I'm moving out of the hospital tomorrow."
"Ah." There's a little catch in Finnick's voice — a breath of good-natured humor. A strange loss that leaves him sounding a little as if he doesn't know how to move forward or where the path is. But he's — he's Finnick Odair and Katniss realizes that for all she doesn't know about him, that still means something idiosyncratic and relieving for it. Because she does know what it sounds like, when he steadies himself and finds his charm.
She hears it now — the little intake of breath, sees it in the way his gaze casts around then settles, warm around the edges. Perfectly executed, more articulate than he's been in the weeks they've been here: "Hard head came in handy?"
"That's what I keep telling people," Katniss replies. She keeps watching him, looking at all the places where he can't inhabit Finnick Odair, can't fill himself up around the edges until he looks whole and wholly like the person he's meant to be. The emptiness just out of your reach, the way you reel in confusion that sinks into the hollows of your bones: Katniss knows what that feels like.
Without thinking about it, she leans forward and lays her knuckles against the back of his hand. Her fingers curl softly to her palm and he moves in kind, allowing his hand to drop and meet hers without resistance.
"You better work on getting out of here yourself," she tells him with a strain of mock-sobriety lacing her tone. "Who else around here is good to talk to?"
"I'm sure you can find someone." The sincerity in his voice, flush and verdant as the first crocuses of spring, catches her and lodges in her throat. He's still smiling, unguarded. Katniss taps one finger against his hand.
"What if I don't want to?"
"Then do what you want."
Finnick knew about this plan — Finnick saved Peeta's life twice, a debt she can never repay, but only because he knew. And this is important — it has to be important. It was important. Except Katniss is exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with the Games or the rebellion or the medicine that lingers in her veins, and there is nothing so tempting as Finnick's voice, right now. His voice stripped of that expecting quality that she hears in Plutarch's and Coin's — that she hears in Gale's, even when he is so careful not to do things that will make her angry: demands hiding behind the shallow wall of anything meant to disguise them, for one reason or another.
Do what you want, Finnick tells her, open and lucid and honest, and Katniss believes in his belief.
Do what you want. Katniss pulls the chair closer, until she can rest her other hand on the bed, and her chin on top of that hand.
"I want you to get better, Odair," she says, just as open and lucid and honest, and the rush of self-hatred doesn't come. "And I want to stay here for a while."
Finnick moves — just enough to return her gesture and brush one finger against the back of her hand.
"That works for me."
They stay like that for the night — quiet and undemanding.
A/N. so what if i - showed up six years later and just. started writing this again.
obviously no guarantees but ? i'm on a rereading/rewatching binge and remembering everything that i fell in love with and always wanted to explore - the dynamics, the politics, emotions and relationships that i wanted to flesh out. i'm also astounded that i checked in on this fic to find recent comments, recent engagement - i really love this platform.
there's a part of me that wants to rewrite this entire thing from scratch but i surprised myself by actually enjoying my writing, despite how old it is and how much i've learned in the interim. so i'll leave it for a while, see how i feel. the only thing i truly cannot do anymore is write in past tense. sorry!
anyway, if you're seeing this story in the year 2k20, of all miracles, thank you.