Interlude: Peeta

Now

I hate the word real. It's taken on this unbearable connotation in my mind that shines like a cheap birthstone and stings like a skinned knee. It used to get tossed at me with a careless blasé whenever we were playing the game that determined how much of my past I got to reclaim. People would throw the word around like it was the ball in a game of bats-and, and look at me like my brain had been demolished instead of just turned upside-down.

It never seemed to pierce as much when it came from Katniss. Whenever she would glance at me, her eyes landing on me and then flitting off like a bee in search of something sweeter, I could look past that and see how her body would strain forward toward me, like she was wordlessly urging me on towards remembrance. Her answers were always tiny victories, always felt like a caress against the skin that throbbed with loss.

Ironic, then, that every inch she sat closer to me at night around the heater caused me to gnaw the inside of my cheeks until I drew blood, that I would have to sit on my fingers until they went numb so that I wouldn't wrap them around her throat.

Imagine a room that is so robbed of color that you can't tell if your eyes are open or not. Imagine scrambling with your fingertips running over the rough walls, trying to find even the smallest seam that can be pulled apart, that can let even the tiniest trickle of light inside.

Now imagine that banks of fluorescent lights flare on with a blaze that is akin to the sun, and you see that you're running hopeless in light and dark alike. There is no door. No window. Not even a crack in the wall.

That's what it's like to lose yourself and not even know you're lost. The lights come on and it doesn't help you at all.

I remember sitting next to her down in the tunnels, the clink of machinery running behind us, creating false warmth in the room that was chilled with dark anxiety. I remember the feel of the pebbly cement wall behind me, the streaks of dirt that danced haphazard trails on the floor beneath me. I remember looking at her, her face as white as cream, pulling leaves out of the hair that was falling free of

its braid.

I remember that she touched me, and it was the first seam in the darkness; it was the first chink in the wall that I could put my fingers in between. For minutes, long minutes, she brushed hair off of my forehead and didn't run; for those endless minutes down in the sewer I realized that even the smallest crack was worth the fight.

You're still trying to protect me. Real or not real?

It's easy, sometimes, to forget that we are not trapped in our own small eternity. In Twelve people pretty much go about their business and don't mess with yours, so entire weeks go by without me seeing anyone other than her and Haymitch. It's easy, then, to ignore the tiny strands of silver that have started glinting in her hair, because she wears it the same way she did when she was 16. It's easy to look past Haymitch's well-worn face and see the youth that still blazes in eyes the color of winter water beneath thin ice.

In our little pocket, you can find eternity in the parenthesis between one week and the next because the time is endless and we stay the same. She hunts. I paint. Haymitch drinks. She writes endless letters that she'll never send. I bake impossibly complicated desserts no one will never eat. Haymitch drinks.

Now the two of us are standing on the outer precipice of that eternity and we are going to have to jump together.

That's what you and I do. Protect each other.

Her face in that clanking room: so tiny, so ashen, her lips chewed raw, her silver eyes mottled with cost. The hesitant smile that almost ghosted across her lips. Her hand so soft against my face, as if she could cross the bridge in between us with touch alone.

I see her now vacillate in between so many emotions that it makes me dizzy just to watch. There are days when she is almost glowing, when there is a bounce in her graceful lope that I have never seen before; days when she is mute with terror, her lips thin white lines that she shoves words out in between like chunks of frost; days when she is almost weeping with uncertainty and she goes to Haymitch, comes creeping back home in the drizzle of early morning.

Last night I heard her in her sleep: Love isn't always a choice. I have no idea where she picked that up, but she has never been more wrong. Maybe the first tiny fizz of love is driven by that familiarity that romantics claim is one heart reaching out to its kindred soul, but when you get down to it love is choosing to cross the distance even when you're in a darkness so complete you could wander forever and never know you were lost.

It is brushing back hair in the soupy warmth of uncertainty.

It is swallowing the blood that coats your teeth in return for another inch of space disappearing in between your bodies.

It is picking a pill from a pocket.

It is saving a pearl.

It is sitting by the heater, letting tendrils of false warmth wind their way around you while you're giving someone back the pieces of his life.

It is the way she nestles against me with her arms curved around her stomach, her eyes closed in a rare peace, our little circle of eternity.

It is the hand beside you in the dark that means you're not alone.